September 30, 2012

Education Reform Gets a Hollywood Boost

With Friday's release of "Won't Back Down," Hollywood has brought to theaters the real-life struggle of millions of parents. The movie features Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis as a parent-and-teacher duo who team up to turn around a chronically failing public school. Rather than acquiesce to the certainty of a subpar education for the children, they fight back--rallying other parents and teachers to the cause of wrestling control of their school from the local school board and putting it in the hands of devoted educators.

It isn't fantasy. The movie is based on new "parent-trigger" laws, a very real policy solution that--depending on the state--gives parents and others the power to reform failing schools; close them; or, in some states, transform them into charter schools. The first parent-trigger law was passed by California in 2010, with bipartisan support in a Democratic legislature.

Today, across six states, parents of more than 14 million students can trigger the turnaround of their local school if it is failing. The laws vary, but in general once a school has been on a state's list of underperforming schools for a specified period, a majority vote by parents and others specified by law can trigger the reform process.

Andrew Cowan on Creative Writing

Creative writing is an academic discipline. I draw a distinction between writing, which is what writers do, and creative writing. I think most people in the UK who teach creative writing have come to it via writing - they are bona fide writers who publish poems and novels and play scripts and the like, and they have found some way of supporting that vocation through having a career in academia. So in teaching aspirant writers how to write they are drawing upon their own experience of working in that medium. They are drawing upon their knowledge of what the problems are and how those problems might be tackled. It's a practice-based form of learning and teaching.

But because it is in academia there is all this paraphernalia that has to go with it. So you get credits for attending classes. You have to do supporting modules; you have to be assessed. If you are doing an undergraduate degree you have to follow a particular curriculum and only about a quarter of that will be creative writing and the rest will be in the canon of English literature. If you are doing a PhD you have to support whatever the creative element is with a critical element. So there are these ways in which academia disciplines writing and I think of that as Creative Writing with a capital C and a capital W. All of us who teach creative writing are doing it, in a sense, to support our writing, but it is also often at the expense of our writing. We give up quite a lot of time and mental energy and also, I think, imaginative and creative energy to teach.

Charges of Bias in Admission Test Policy at Eight Elite Public High Schools

A coalition of educational and civil rights groups filed a federal complaint on Thursday saying that black and Hispanic students were disproportionately excluded from New York City's most selective high schools because of a single-test admittance policy they say is racially discriminatory.

The complaint, filed with the United States Education Department, seeks to have the policy found in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and to change admissions procedures "to something that is nondiscriminatory and fair to all students," said Damon T. Hewitt, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, one of the groups that filed the complaint.

At issue is the Specialized High School Admissions Test, which is the sole criterion for admission to eight specialized schools that, even in the view of city officials, have been troubled by racial demographics that are out of balance.

Although 70 percent of the city's public school students are black and Hispanic, a far smaller percentage have scored high enough to receive offers from one of the schools. According to the complaint, 733 of the 12,525 black and Hispanic students who took the exam were offered seats this year. For whites, 1,253 of the 4,101 test takers were offered seats. Of 7,119 Asian students who took the test, 2,490 were offered seats. At Stuyvesant High School, the most sought-after school, 19 blacks were offered seats in a freshman class of 967.

Why American Students Can't Write: Response From A Teacher in Chile

I make my comments based only on the information given above, and as a teacher of writing in both the university and high school setting.

Let's proceed. Having said that, I question the phrase, "coherent sentences", and wonder aloud if "cohesive sentences" may have been the appropriate term, or quite likely, "grammatically correct sentences".

Not being able to write a "coherent sentence" means quite simply, the students were writing incoherent sentences, or put another way, sentences which make no sense. I wonder how true that statement is of the previous situation at New Dorp High School.

Next, we are told that a return to a focus on the fundamentals of grammar and expository essays brought tremendous improvement, described as, "soaring pass rates for the English Regents test and the global-history exam."

Parent Power Film Stirs Education Reformers' Hopes

Education reform film "Won't Back Down" opened Friday to terrible reviews - and high hopes from activists who expect the movie to inspire parents everywhere to demand big changes in public schools.

The drama stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as a spirited mother who teams up with a passionate teacher to seize control of their failing neighborhood school, over the opposition of a self-serving teachers union.

Reviewers called it trite and dull, but education reformers on both the left and right have hailed the film as a potential game-changer that could aid their fight to weaken teachers' unions and inject more competition into public education.

Maggie Gyllenhaal talks unions, education and motherhood

IN THE NEW movie "Won't Back Down," Maggie Gyllenhaal ("Crazy Heart," "Hysteria") plays Jamie Fitzpatrick, a blue-collar single mom who takes issue with her daughter's crappy public school.

With no money to send her somewhere else and with the neighborhood's top charter school a long-shot pick in a lottery, Jamie teams up with a disgruntled teacher (Viola Davis), whose son has his own academic issues, to take over and improve the school so it works better for all the children.

"Won't Back Down" has raised the ire of teachers unions, but Gyllenhaal believes that's the wrong way to look at the movie.

Education reform: still leaving our kids behind

The new movie "Won't Back Down" is to public education what Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" was to the meatpacking industry -- a needed spotlight, but not for the squeamish. In this case, the product unfit for human consumption is, unfortunately, the instruction of children. The movie chronicles the struggles of the mother of a dyslexic child in a failing school. The villains are clock-punching teachers, apathetic parents, change-resistant union officials and unreachable administrators. The movie adds a happy ending, which seems the most unrealistic portion of the script.

Union officials naturally find this portrait offensive. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, calls the movie "divisive" and a presentation of "stereotypes."

September 29, 2012

Is Teacher Union "Collective Bargaining" Good for Students?

The Madison School Board has scheduled [PDF] a 2:00p.m. meeting tomorrow, Sunday 30 September for an "Initial exchange of proposals and supporting rationale for such proposals in regard to collective bargaining negotiations regarding the Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBA) for MMSD Madison Teachers, Inc. (MTI) Teachers, Substitute Teachers, Educational Assistants, Supportive Educational Employees (SEE), and School Security Assistants (SSA), held as a public meeting pursuant to Wis. Stat. §111.70(4)(cm)".

The School Board along with other Madison area governments have moved quickly to negotiate or extend agreements with several public sector unions after a judicial decision overturning parts of Wisconsin's Act 10. The controversial passage of Act 10 changed the dynamic between public sector organizations and organized labor.

I've contemplated these events and thought back to a couple of first hand experiences:

In the first example, two Madison School District teacher positions were being reduced to one. Evidently, under the CBA, both had identical tenure so the choice was a coin toss. The far less qualified teacher "won", while the other was laid off.

In the second example, a Madison School District teacher and parent lamented to me the poor teacher one of their children experienced (in the same District) and that "there is nothing that can be done about it".

In the third example, a parent, after several years of their child's "mediocre" reading and writing experiences asked that they be given the "best teacher". The response was that they are "all good". Maybe so.

Conversely, I've seen a number of teachers go far out of their way to help students learn, including extra time after school and rogue curricula such as phonics and Singapore Math.

I am unaware of the School Board meeting on a Sunday, on short notice, to address the District's long time reading problems.

"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).

Unlike his parents, John Sherry enrolled in college after graduating from high school in Grand Junction, a boom-bust, agriculture-and-energy outpost of 100,000 inhabitants on Colorado's western edge. John lasted two years at Metropolitan State University in Denver before he dropped out, first to bag groceries at Safeway, later to teach preschool children, a job he still holds. He knew it was time to quit college when he failed statistics two semesters in a row. Years passed before John realized just how much the economic statistics were stacked against him, in a way they never were against his father.

Greg Sherry, who works for a railroad, is 58 and is chugging toward retirement with an $80,000-a-year salary, a full pension, and a promise of health coverage for life. John scrapes by on $11 an hour, with few health benefits. "I feel like I'm working really hard," he says, "but I'm not getting ahead."

This isn't the lifestyle that John's parents wished upon their younger child. But it reflects the state of upward--or downward--mobility in the American economy today.

California passes groundbreaking open textbook legislation

It's official. In California, Governor Jerry Brown has signed two bills (SB 1052 and SB 1053) that will provide for the creation of free, openly licensed digital textbooks for the 50 most popular lower-division college courses offered by California colleges. The legislation was introduced by Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and passed by the California Senate and Assembly in late August.

A crucial component of the California legislation is that the textbooks developed will be made available under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY):

The textbooks and other materials are placed under a creative commons attribution license that allows others to use, distribute, and create derivative works based upon the digital material while still allowing the authors or creators to receive credit for their efforts.

The Crisis in Higher Education Online versions of college courses are attracting hundreds of thousands of students, millions of dollars in funding, and accolades from university administrators.

A hundred years ago, higher education seemed on the verge of a technological revolution. The spread of a powerful new communication network--the modern postal system--had made it possible for universities to distribute their lessons beyond the bounds of their campuses. Anyone with a mailbox could enroll in a class. Frederick Jackson Turner, the famed University of Wisconsin historian, wrote that the "machinery" of distance learning would carry "irrigating streams of education into the arid regions" of the country. Sensing a historic opportunity to reach new students and garner new revenues, schools rushed to set up correspondence divisions. By the 1920s, postal courses had become a full-blown mania. Four times as many people were taking them as were enrolled in all the nation's colleges and universities combined.

The hopes for this early form of distance learning went well beyond broader access. Many educators believed that correspondence courses would be better than traditional on-campus instruction because assignments and assessments could be tailored specifically to each student. The University of Chicago's Home-Study Department, one of the nation's largest, told prospective enrollees that they would "receive individual personal attention," delivered "according to any personal schedule and in any place where postal service is available." The department's director claimed that correspondence study offered students an intimate "tutorial relationship" that "takes into account individual differences in learning." The education, he said, would prove superior to that delivered in "the crowded classroom of the ordinary American University."

SAT Scores Fall as More Students Take Exam

SAT scores for the high-school graduating class of 2012 fell in two of the test's three sections, with reading dropping to the lowest level in four decades on the college-entrance test, according to data released Monday.

Only 43% of the 1.66 million private- and public-school students who took the college-entrance exam posted scores showing they are prepared to do well in college, according to data released by the College Board, the nonprofit group that administers the SAT. That was unchanged from last year.

Nationwide, 44% of high-school freshmen go on to attend college and 21% earn a bachelor's degree in six years, the College Board said.

The SAT tests students in reading, math and writing, with a possible score of 800 on each section. Students needed a score of 1550 out of the total 2400 to indicate college readiness, defined as a 65% chance of maintaining at least a B-minus as a university freshman.

The hidden problem of chronic absence

We've just posted a story I wrote about chronic absenteeism -- when a student misses 10 percent or more school days for any reason, excused or unexcused.

A small, but growing number of school districts in California have begun to crunch the numbers to see which of their students are habitually out of school, and how many. Traditionally, schools have looked only at how many of their students attend school each day, on average, or how many were truant or tardy.

When you count excused absences, the number of kindergartners who miss 18 or more days of school might surprise you (unless you're a kindergarten teacher).

Top 10 Rural Michigan High Schools

Our new "Context and Peformance" Report Card factors student poverty levels into four years of standardized test scores for nearly 600 public high schools in Michigan and ranks the schools accordingly. Here's a list of the top 10 rural high schools.

September 28, 2012

Can Public Schools Really Change?

As the recent Chicago teacher strike demonstrated, public school systems are phenomenally difficult institutions to change. The array of competing forces--unions, politicians, parents, principals, charter schools, state and national bureaucrats--gums up many reform efforts and frustrates all but the most persistent reformers. But what's happening in the historically troubled New Haven, Conn., public school system suggests there may be ways around this, ways that all sides can support.

In 2009, New Haven's school district and teachers' union signed a groundbreaking contract for the 21,000-student system. The four-year deal included a small annual pay hike--and allowed the district to give merit bonuses, close failing schools, and evaluate teachers based in part on student performance. The contract's reform-minded provisions brought praise to a struggling urban district, from admirers including Obama's Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, and New York Times columnists David Brooks and Nicholas Kristof. Three years later, there are signs that cultural change is coming, too, in fits and starts. It's especially evident in the district's unusual effort to groom future leaders by handing them over to a local charter network that it used to view as an upstart threat.

How Liberal Arts Colleges Are Failing America

When are Americans going to wake up and realize that the 60s and 70s-era nostalgia for the "value" of a college degree is just that -- nostalgia?

A degree does not guarantee you or your children a good job anymore. In fact, it doesn't guarantee you a job: last year, 1 out of 2 bachelor's degree holders under 25 were jobless or unemployed. Since the recession, we've lost millions of high- and mid-wage jobs -- and replaced a handful of those with lower-wage ones. No wonder some young people are giving up entirely -- a 16.8 percent unemployment rate plus soaring student loan debt is more than a little discouraging. Yet old-guard academic leaders are still clinging to the status quo -- and loudly insisting that a four-year liberal arts degree is a worthy investment in every young American's future.

Case in point: I was recently invited to keynote during a conference at the Lyles Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Fresno, Cal. As someone who works every day to give more people access to entrepreneurship education, it's refreshing to talk to educators who are adapting their curricula in the interest of actually preparing students for a new economy. But one educator told me a story that made my blood boil, about a college president who recently terminated his institution's entrepreneurship education program.

Reflections From Two Years of Khan Academy in the Classroom

Students need to be given the opportunity to take ownership of their learning
One of the most striking changes we often see in Khan Academy users, particularly historically underperforming students, is a dramatic increase in engagement, confidence, and ownership of the learning process. Many people assume personalized learning works best for high-achieving students who are self-motivated. However, we regularly hear stories like these from Oakland Unity, on dramatic changes in student study habits and overall confidence.

It turns out that you can turn a demotivated student into a motivated one when you actually give him the opportunity to succeed. The traditional one-size-fits-all classroom approach takes a student who fails a test, slaps him with a poor grade, and moves him to more advanced topics he has no hope of understanding. It is almost comical that we ever thought this would work. Not only are we pushing the student forward inappropriately, we are telling him he is a bad student and breaking his confidence.

Our approach with Khan Academy is fundamentally different. We allow students to jump back to the material they need help on. They can take as long as necessary to actually learn it. They gain a sense of success and accomplishment when they progress, no matter where their starting point was. They finally see a path in which they can improve, and they take responsibility for their learning.

Why are so many financial aid rules at odds with so many academic policies and goals?

Because financial aid is mostly federal, but public colleges are mostly run by states. And the two levels of government have different goals.

Some of that is because the feds are allowed to run deficits and the states generally aren't. (I'm not counting unfunded pensions as deficits; they're more like long-term debts. I'm using deficits to refer to annual operational shortfalls.) So in a recession, the feds can increase spending, but the states have to cut theirs. That showed up over the last few years in a pretty dramatic way. Federal spending on Pell grants increased dramatically, but state spending on operating money for higher education dropped hard. As a result, colleges shifted more of the expense of operations to students. Consequently, the increase in federal financial aid didn't really increase funding for higher ed; it simply made up for part of the state cuts. With the federal foot on the accelerator and the state foot on the brake, it was hard to make real progress in any given direction.

Annoyingly, that kind of unappreciated conflict leads to easy demagoguery, as folks who aren't big fans of higher ed in the first place are able to say things like "we increased aid dramatically, and nothing happened!" Which is true, as long as you only look at one piece of the picture in isolation.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: A Triple Play on Local Taxpayers

This is the second time local officials in Madison have jumped at the chance to extend existing contracts for their workers. They previously did so just before the Act 10 restrictions on unions went into effect.

In both cases, elected officials will tout "savings" resulting from the contract extensions. But what's really happening is local officials are locking into place for a longer period of time more favorable deals for public workers. Local officials will have fewer options for protecting taxpayers and basic public services if their budgets grow markedly worse.

Teachers brought disrespect on themselves

Last week state schools superintendent Tony Evers presented his status of education in Wisconsin report and encouraged residents to show more respect and value for teachers. He missed the point -- he should have challenged teachers to cease their whining, their defiant and disorderly assemblies and illegal strikes, which we have endured in recent years.

The teachers and Madison union leader John Matthews should recognize the considerable damage they have done to their reputation and credibility. They have forgotten who continues to provide their generous salaries for a nine-month job.

September 27, 2012

Why Are We Afraid to Show Off Our Brightest Students?

[Atlantic Editor: High school athletes are the pride of their communities. But if we want to inspire kids to write well, we should be putting the exemplary work of our best young high school scholars on display.]

As the editor of The Concord Review, I have been glad to publish more than 1,000 exemplary high school history research papers by students from 46 states and 38 other countries since 1987. Yet I have long been aware that little "personal" essays have killed off academic expository writing in most of our schools.

For generations, American children in our schools have had their writing limited to short pieces about themselves, from primary school up through their "college essays" (those little 500-word "personal" narratives). As long as English teachers have borne all the responsibility for reading and writing in the schools, the reading has been fiction, the writing personal and "creative." Lately a genre has emerged called "creative nonfiction," but that turns out to be just more solipsistic autobiography.

Most of our students never read a single history book and they very rarely write a serious term paper before graduating from high school. They learn to write without learning anything beyond their own feelings and the events of their present lives, and their teachers are able to grade that work without knowing much either.

Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, put it very well in August this year: "The single biggest complaint from college teachers and employers is that high school graduates cannot write as well as they need to." As a result, the member companies of the Business Roundtable have been saddled with a $3 billion bill for remedial writing courses every year, not only for their hourly hires but for their current and new salaried employees.

There are a few exceptions, of course. For decades, the International Baccalaureate has required a 4,000 (16-page) Extended Essay for the Diploma, and thousands of American students have done that. Even the College Board has begun to think of a small pilot program on term papers as well.

The New Common Core standards, a set of reforms that will soon be applied by most states, talk about nonfiction reading, but that category seems to include more memos, short speeches, brochures, and technical articles than anything like a complete history book. The standards also mention something about nonfiction writing, but all of the examples in the Appendix seem to be only more two-page efforts that will far from challenge the capability of our students in academic writing.

By publishing Peg Tyre's story "The Writing Revolution," The Atlantic is doing a great service for our students who need to learn to do some serious academic expository writing while they are still in high school. However, I would add that students also benefit from seeing exemplary expository essays written by their peers.

At The Concord Review, I've seen many examples of first-rate academic writing on historical topics. Students are startled, challenged, and inspired when they see this kind of work by people their own age. "When I first came across The Concord Review, I was extremely impressed by the quality of writing and the breadth of historical topics covered by the essays in it," one New Jersey public school girl wrote to me. "The chance to delve further into a historical topic was an incredible experience for me, and the honor of being published is by far the greatest I have ever received. This coming autumn, I will be starting at Oxford University, where I will be concentrating in Modern History."

It may be objected that this is a letter from a good student. Where are the letters from struggling students? I would respond that in sports, we are quite happy to present other students with the very best public performances of their most athletic peers. But when it comes to academics, we seem afraid to show students the exemplary work of their peers, for fear of driving them away. This dichotomy has always seemed strange to me.

Of course we must pay attention to our least able students, just as we must pay attention to the those who have the most difficulty in our gym classes. But it would't hurt, in my view, to dare to recognize and distribute some of our students' best academic work, in the hopes that it may challenge many others of them to put in a little more effort. Surely that is worth a try.

What Teachers Told the U.S. Department of Education

Over eighty meetings with teachers and school leaders in a two-week cross-country blitz -- not bad work for a team of twelve Teaching Ambassador Fellows (TAFs) working for a year with the U.S. Department of Education.

The Department of Education's third annual back-to-school bus tour kicked off at Sequoia High School in Redwood City, California on September 12 and culminates with rally at the Department's plaza on September 21, with nearly a hundred events in between featuring Secretary Arne Duncan and top federal officials. While Secretary Duncan's appearances have naturally soaked up most of the attention-- whether he is dancing at a Denver elementary school for "Let's Move" or honoring the Topeka, Kansas site of the Brown vs. Board of Education case-- TAFs have been hosting intimate events to ensure that educators' voices are heard.

As We May Think

Of what lasting benefit has been man's use of science and of the new instruments which his research brought into existence? First, they have increased his control of his material environment. They have improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence. They have given him increased knowledge of his own biological processes so that he has had a progressive freedom from disease and an increased span of life. They are illuminating the interactions of his physiological and psychological functions, giving the promise of an improved mental health.

Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual.

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers--conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.

Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.

Which colleges help grads snare top salaries?

In an era of dubious economic milestones, it was yet another lowlight. This spring, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Americans' total student-loan debt ballooned to more than $900 billion -- higher than their total credit-card debt. And no wonder the debt is piling up: Over the past two decades, the price of tuition has risen 20 times as fast as the average college grad's wages.

Statistics like these help to flesh out a now-familiar message: The cost of college has escalated from unsettling to obscene. College administrators say that the soaring price tags reflect the rising costs of their own biggest expenses -- faculty salaries and state-of-the-art dorms and facilities.

Placing School Bureaucrats Before Children

New legislation introduced last week in the Michigan House would ban for three years any new charter public schools from opening in the vicinity of two conventional public school districts that have consolidated. Two districts considering consolidation are located in the district represented by bill sponsor Rep. David Rutledge, D-Ypsilanti, who told AnnArbor.com his bill would "protect a newly merged school district from companies attempting to capitalize on the tenuous transition of consolidating." Five other lawmakers from both parties have cosponsored the bill.

The representatives may mean well, but the effect of this bill would be to place the status quo school establishment's interests, including school boards, superintendents and the teachers union ahead of the families and children they represent. Those children deserve a chance at obtaining the best education possible -- even if that means attending a charter public school their parents have chosen.

Chicago, Teacher Unions & K-12 Spending

On September 18, 2012, the Chicago Teachers Union negotiated a settlement with the City after going on strike for seven days. At issue in the dispute were critical issues like teacher salaries, working conditions, and teacher evaluations. As is typical in these situations, neither side held all the high cards. The two parties had to agree to compromises that patched up the current difficulties without implementing any sensible long-term reforms.

The wage piece of the deal is likely to add about $74 million per year over the next four years to a municipal budget that is already deeply in the red. The extra dollars that go into wages will be taken out of other budgets, rendering classrooms and other facilities less suitable than before. The moderately stiffer standards for teacher evaluation, both before and after tenure, may make marginal improvements in teaching performance, but none that will be significant in the short term. The overall dismal performance of the Chicago public school system, with its 60 percent graduation rate, will remain more or less what it has been.

Confucius Institute Teaches Chinese to American Students

In the last few years, China has opened hundreds of Chinese language and culture institutes around the world. They're called Confucius Institutes and dozens are in the United States, where they've helped to set up Chinese language and culture teaching programs, from elite universities to urban K-12 school districts. Are Confucius Institutes a way to build bridges of understanding between the two countries? Or are they examples of China flexing its "soft power" abroad and trying to portray itself in the most positive light? KCRW's Saul Gonzalez explores the issue.

In related news, MLive.com recently found that 68 percent of all grades handed out at the colleges where these teachers and principals are trained were A's. Like the mythical Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average, apparently so are Michigan public school teachers and principals.

Unfortunately, real-life student performance paints a very different picture. For example, if we compare the performance of Michigan's low-income students to ones with similar demographics in other states, the picture suggest something less than 99 percent "effective":

Want to Change Academic Publishing? Just Say No

When I became a professor, 20 years ago, I received a request from a woman who lived close to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I taught: Could she come and talk to me about a set of interests she was developing, in the area of my own specialty in anthropology, and get my advice on applying to graduate school? We spoke for about 45 minutes in my office, at the end of which she asked, "How much do I owe you?"

This woman was a therapist who billed by the hour, and she assumed that when you got the benefit of someone's professional expertise for 45 minutes, you paid for it. Although I would expect to pay a lawyer or a therapist for a professional consultation, the idea of paying for a conversation with me seemed bizarre. I explained that professors, especially in the humanities and social sciences, get paid an annual salary and, in return, see it as part of our job to share our knowledge and to mentor others. We had a vocation, not a trade. The life of the mind is not billable.

Bias Persists for Women of Science, a Study Finds

Science professors at American universities widely regard female undergraduates as less competent than male students with the same accomplishments and skills, a new study by researchers at Yale concluded.

As a result, the report found, the professors were less likely to offer the women mentoring or a job. And even if they were willing to offer a job, the salary was lower.

The bias was pervasive, the scientists said, and probably reflected subconscious cultural influences rather than overt or deliberate discrimination.

Kindergarten Exams Gain Steam

(Reuters) - With school in full swing across the United States, the littlest students are getting used to the blocks table and the dress-up corner - and that staple of American public education, the standardized test.

A national push to make public schools more rigorous and hold teachers more accountable has led to a vast expansion of testing in kindergarten. And more exams are on the way, including a test meant to determine whether 5-year-olds are on track to succeed in college and career.

Paul Weeks, a vice president at test developer ACT Inc., says he knows that particular assessment sounds a bit nutty, especially since many kindergarteners aspire to careers as superheroes. "What skills do you need for that, right? Flying is good. X-ray vision?" he said, laughing.

How to Raise High-Achieving Kids

Here's a novel recipe for raising successful kids: see that they're born overseas, but bring them to America before they hit their teens.

That, at least, is the implication of a new study by sociologists at John Hopkins University who tracked 10,795 adolescents into young adulthood.

Basically, the sociologists found that the immigrant teens beat the pants off native born children in academic achievement and, as adults, psychological well-being. American born children of immigrants also seemed to enjoy an advantage. The researchers adjusted for socioeconomic background and school conditions, so they were comparing apples to apples.

Progress in Identifying the Genetic Roots of Autism

One of the most agonizing questions that parents of children with autism ask is--why?

Now, a growing number of genetic tests are providing some answers.

Scientists say that roughly 20% of autism cases can be linked to known genetic abnormalities, and many more may be discovered.

Pinpointing a genetic explanation can help predict whether siblings are likely to have the disorder--and even point to new, targeted treatments. Last week, for example, researchers reported that an experimental drug, arbaclofen, reduced social withdrawal and challenging behaviors in children and adults with Fragile X syndrome, the single most common genetic cause of autism.

U.S. Kids Eat Nearly As Much Salt As Adults, Putting Health At Risk

Yes, we love salt. It makes everything taste better. But as a society, we're eating way too much of it. And, so are our children.

A new study from researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that children in the U.S. between the ages of 8 and 18 are eating, on average, 3,387 mg per day. That's about the same amount as adults. But it's a lot more than the 2,300 mg daily limit recommended by the federal dietary guidelines.

And the result? Janelle Gunn, a public health analyst with the CDC, says it's pretty clear. "We found that higher sodium intake was associated with higher blood pressure," she says.

September 25, 2012

EdTogether Launches

EdTogether is a nonprofit education policy and advocacy group committed to closing Wisconsin's achievement gaps through collaborative policy design, research, and advocacy. All Wisconsin students deserve access to an excellent education that will prepare them for future success. To realize this goal, we must bring together stakeholders to design and advocate for targeted, preventative policies built on our core values of equity, inclusion, and rigor.

ACT 10 Ruled Null & Void

MTI's September 14 Circuit Court victory, in which significant portions of Governor Walker's union busting legislation (Act 10) were found to be unconstitutional, has gained world-wide attention.

Recognition has been noted twice in The Wall Street Journal, along with articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, in Great Britain, and numerous newspapers throughout Wisconsin. It has also been the subject of daily TV and radio coverage. Announcement of the decision received a standing ovation at the Fighting Bob Fest, and at the Osaka, Japan Social Forum. Public employees in Osaka are suffering from Act 10-like legislation.

MTI Executive Director John Matthews hailed Judge Colas' decision as restoring the basic rights of collective bargaining to Wisconsin's public employees. He said, "This is the ticket to restoring employees' equal voice in the workplace, and the means of assuring justice for those not only represented by MTI, but by numerous other Wisconsin public sector unions." MTI has requested that the Madison Metropolitan School District timely engage in collective bargaining with MTI to establish contract terms for MTI's five (5) collective bargaining units, for the 2013-14 contract term.

The State has asked Judge Colas to stay (delay) implementation of his decision pending appeal.

Educators are waking up all over Madison this morn able to concentrate on students like it's Jan 2011. It's beautiful. #bargainingworks

Sarah Lawrence, With Guns

We asked a former West Point professor about teaching literature at the nation's most prestigious military academy. What he told us revealed the truth behind the country's most elite warrior caste - and how liberal heroes like Thoreau and the Beats inspire the next generation of "Runaway Generals."

Teacher Union Influence Spending

The strike by public school teachers in Chicago this month drew national attention to a fierce debate over the future of education and exposed the ruptured relationship between teachers' unions and Democrats like Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Over the past few years, lawmakers who have previously been considered solid supporters of teachers' unions have tangled with them over a national education agenda that includes new performance evaluations based partly on test scores, the overhaul of tenure and the expansion of charter schools.

As these traditional political alliances have shifted, teachers' unions have pursued some strange bedfellows among lawmakers who would not appear to be natural allies.

In Illinois, the top three recipients of political contributions from the Illinois Education Association this year are Republicans, including a candidate for the State House who has Tea Party support and advocates lower taxes and smaller government.

For more than 30 years, Buckingham was the UK's only private university. Does its history offer lessons on the way forward for higher education?

There are two types of university in Britain, explains Professor Terence Kealey, vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham. There are private ones, such as Buckingham and the newly opened New College of the Humanities in London, and there are those that are funded and controlled by the state. Kealey does not approve of the latter type.

If you're a university, says Kealey, you should want to be private. Being private, you can charge whatever fees you want, teach whatever subjects you want, to whomever you want. If Britain had more private universities, says Kealey, we would be able to compete with the best in the world. As it is, we're slipping.

Why? Well, says Kealey, "the best universities in the world are the Ivy League. The next best are the English-speaking ones that are independent but not totally." These, says Kealey, are "in the thrall of social engineering". And then come the universities of continental Europe. These institutions, he says, are nationalised, like Britain's railway system used to be. So there's no incentive for them to excel. They're sinking in the mire of a planned economy, like 1970s commuters waiting on grotty platforms for trains that always arrive late.

On School Tax & Spending

In 2011, Chicago's public schools spent $7,946 per pupil for instructional (that is, classroom) purposes; the New Trier school district, a short ride up the road, spent $12,043, or 51 percent more. In a class of 25 kids, that's a difference of more than $102,000. This explains why starting and maximum salaries for teachers in New Trier are much higher than in Chicago; and why the average teacher salary in New Trier is $103,000 compared with Chicago's $71,000. (These figures are from the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability in Chicago, which tracks fiscal- equity trends.)

The point? When suburban schools pay better, have much nicer facilities and working conditions, and are filled with kids who are easier to teach (because they don't have the many problems that come with poverty), it is no surprise that, over time, the best teachers gravitate to the best suburban schools. We are relying on the "missionary plan" to staff schools in poor neighborhoods.

The local property-tax basis of much school finance means wealthier communities can tax themselves at lower rates and still generate far more spending per pupil. New Trier has 7.5 times the property wealth per pupil that Chicago has, taxes its residents' property at roughly half Chicago's rate, and generates vastly more dollars per pupil.

It's about education, not teachers

The Chicago teachers' strike has sparked interest and debate far beyond the school district. Folks outside the education field are weighing in on how much teachers should earn, how much responsibility teachers should bear for declining tests scores, and the greed of unions. Some experts even predicted the nation's union-busting eyes were on Chicago, predicting a possible ripple-effect depending upon the outcome.

For many outside the negotiations, opinions, tempers and solutions ran amok. Schools of thought ran from, teachers make too much for just nine months work to unions protect bad teachers to teachers are responsible for low test performance. Perusing the social media, it was easy to find suggestions of what the ideal and fair teacher's compensation should be, all by nonteachers, of course.

Researching the Research

The phrase "research-based", or some variant thereof, appears more than 100 times in the language of No Child Left Behind. Grounding educational practice in solid science was, and still is, an important goal. But, as most people know, finding your way through the research landscape of teaching and learning isn't exactly a walk in the park. That's why "When Can You Trust the Experts?" is such an important book.

Written by Daniel Willingham, cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, this informative and accessible book is a must-read for anyone trying to understand what works, what doesn't, and whether or not good science is being used to support such judgments.

At School, Overweight Children Carry A Heavy Burden

One in three children in the United States is overweight or obese. Significant numbers of those young people are grappling with health problems like heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes.

Those conditions can be difficult for children to manage in any setting, but they can pose particular challenges for children during the school day.

Dr. Yolandra Hancock used to be an elementary school teacher, and it shows. She's patient, encouraging and has an endearing way of ending her sentences with "my love" and "my sweet."

Her patients include a 13-year-old who weighs 400 pounds; a child whose teeth are so rotted she can't bite into carrots; and many preteens who are diabetic. Today, Hancock is examining Derek Lyles, 13. He's 4 feet 11 inches and weighs 256 pounds.

September 24, 2012

Emanuel's push for more Chicago charter schools is in full swing: Now that the teachers strike is over, mayor is free to expand charter schools in Chicago

Chicago Public Schools officials expect about 53,000 of the district's roughly 400,000 students will attend charter schools this year, and the number of charters will increase to more than 100. The city is aiming to add 60 charter schools in the next five years with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is trying to expand charters across the country.

The biggest push for charter schools locally comes from some of the wealthiest backers of Emanuel, including Bruce Rauner, a venture capitalist who regularly advises the mayor. At a seminar of business and political leaders held the same day teachers voted to return to school, Rauner said the strike would only energize reform efforts that he called a "multiyear revolution."

"I think we're going to have a coalescing of interests that's a focus and drive some major change. And there are some plans in the works, some charter community education innovators who are now focusing on Chicago, and I think in the coming years we can innovate," he said.

Experts called the union's stand against privately run networks unique in the United States, where several big cities, including New York, also have pushed charter schools.

"What's different is this is really the first mass movement against that comprehensive strategy" for privatization, said Janelle Scott, an associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies school policy.

"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).

That means you can bypass the j-school debates and take control over your education by taking the most important step: Be actively involved in your education. This is even more important that deciding what school you'll attend. Don't wait for academia to determine what you need to know for modern journalism. Be proactive and find out by using digital media to help you learn those skills.

This means more than just attending the required classes. This means more work than is assigned. This means more than a letter grade or GPA. This means meeting and engaging with more than your classmates and professors at your school.

This means using the power of the web and social media to augment your education and introduce yourself to more than just the curriculum outlined by your individual school.

Charter Caps, Laser Pointers and SuperPACs

Here's a partial list of proposed business items currently under review by the board of directors and various committees of the California Teachers Association:

* That CTA amend the first paragraph on charter schools to read "CTA believes the role of charter schools is to provide students, parents and CTA members with educational opportunities that supplement not supplant public school offerings."

Rationale: Current language does not deal with the reality that charter school growth is often negatively impacting school districts' programs and forcing our members to become subject to reduction in force.

* That CTA amend by addition to policy on charter schools the following first paragraph: "CTA believes in a cap on charter schools that does not exceed 10% of school districts' enrollment."

Longtime educator running for Live Oak school board as an advocate for students and teachers

Phyllis Greenleaf has spent much of her life working to improve education, promoting the idea of teaching to the whole child in the numerous college classes she has taught on child development and learning.

Greenleaf is vying for one of three four-year seats on the board along with current board member Heather Rhodes and Jeremy Ray, a fire captain in Santa Clara.
"I'm not running for the board -- I'm walking," Greenleaf jokes.
As part of her campaign, she and friends have been going door to door to as many residences in the district as they can to introduce herself.

KIPP gains survive new scrutiny, with a footnote

New research on the nation's largest and best-performing charter school network has a dull title -- "Student Selection, Attrition, and Replacement in KIPP Middle Schools" -- but it adds fuel to a fierce national debate over why KIPP looks so good and whether schools should follow its example.

No charter school network has been researched as much as KIPP, which has 125 schools and 39,000 students in 20 states and the District. Most of the studies say its schools have had large and positive impacts on student achievement when compared to regular public schools. But some smart critics, including scholars Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation and Gary Miron of Western Michigan University, have found a potential glitch in the analysis.

Most KIPP campuses are fifth-through-eighth-grade middle schools. Students arrive far below grade level but flourish because of KIPP's longer school days and years and careful teacher selection, training and support.

Nonetheless, some KIPP parents move away or decide KIPP is not right for their children. Kahlenberg and Miron say that inflates the average scores of students who stay, compared to regular schools: At KIPP schools, they argue, lower-performing students who leave early are not replaced by incoming low scorers as they are in regular schools.

KIPP gains survive new scrutiny, with a footnote

New research on the nation's largest and best-performing charter school network has a dull title -- "Student Selection, Attrition, and Replacement in KIPP Middle Schools" -- but it adds fuel to a fierce national debate over why KIPP looks so good and whether schools should follow its example.

No charter school network has been researched as much as KIPP, which has 125 schools and 39,000 students in 20 states and the District. Most of the studies say its schools have had large and positive impacts on student achievement when compared to regular public schools. But some smart critics, including scholars Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation and Gary Miron of Western Michigan University, have found a potential glitch in the analysis.

Most KIPP campuses are fifth-through-eighth-grade middle schools. Students arrive far below grade level but flourish because of KIPP's longer school days and years and careful teacher selection, training and support.

Nonetheless, some KIPP parents move away or decide KIPP is not right for their children. Kahlenberg and Miron say that inflates the average scores of students who stay, compared to regular schools: At KIPP schools, they argue, lower-performing students who leave early are not replaced by incoming low scorers as they are in regular schools.

There should be a school for that

Much has been written about achievement gaps in the United States, with even more energy and dollars devoted to reducing them, for decades now.

Not only has seeking to help low-income and minority children do much better academically been an essential quest -- one that must continue -- but it's also fair to say it has been at the very core of our attempts to significantly improve American elementary and secondary education.

Yet it's also fair to say that another large achievement gap has been mostly ignored over this same long period: The dangerous distance between America's strongest students and their counterparts around the world -- with top pupils elsewhere consistently coming out ahead.

Just one example: Six percent of U.S. students perform at what's called "advanced proficiency" in math. This is a smaller proportion than in 30 other nations.

Rejecting test scores as a core value

That's what Chicago teachers union president Karen Lewis kept reminding the public during the seven-day teachers strike that had parents scrambling and kept 350,000 children out of class.

But there was way more than respect at stake in the dispute. It was a clash between an impatient mayor and a demoralized teaching corps over competing visions of public schools -- one side focused on job protection, the other on accountability.

"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).

Public education - part three

Is the confrontation in Chicago symbolic of what should immediately be debated and resolved in a most profound manner nationally, benefitting all students first and foremost; underscored by a clarifying sense that professional educators, a majority of which strive to care for a nation's ills sociologically by teaching and loving all children; and surely are one of the most valuable assets this nation possesses?

Accountability at every level of the process needs to be accomplished with diligent care and articulated for the sake of our youth, for a keen sense of what their destiny might look like; and well beyond the petty politics dividing legislators and those charged with the capacity to impact growth, development, and overall welfare of children.

The University of Chicago Chooses Decline

The University of Chicago hit two mile-markers in its decade-long transformation this week. The first, generally celebrated by students, alumni, and their parents, is a new high-water mark in the school's US News & World Report ranking. The University now shares the fourth spot with Columbia, rising from 12 a few years ago and leapfrogging Stanford, Penn, and MIT, among others.

The second is a reduction in the graduation requirements. Starting next quarter, graduates will not have to pass a swimming test and either pass a fitness test or take three PE classes to graduate. In an email to students, the Dean of the College cited a rationale steeped in the lingo of a marketing consultant:

The change in the College physical education requirement occurs in the context of a larger decision by the University to reimagine and expand our fitness and athletics programs to meet growing demand and the diverse needs of our community.

These may seem like unrelated incidents, but they reflect a massive paradigm shift in the way the University sees itself. Since it wants donations from trustees who prize vacuous but still prestigious measures of schooling excellence like the US News rankings, the University has goaded itself into playing the rankings game.

Seeking to capitalize on the momentum of the Chicago teachers strike, unions and allied parent and community groups promised Friday to launch a nationwide fight against government-led school reform efforts that they say are only making public education worse.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten announced at a news conference in Washington that they plan workshops, town halls and other events in 11 cities to engage communities in finding their own solutions to improve public education.

For years, unions have pushed back against government interventions in education reform, including the closure of failing schools, the takeover of others by private consultants and the growth in charter schools. They say school closures put a disproportionate number of African-American teachers out of work and leave blighted communities with even fewer resources. They also decry what they say is a "top-down" reform effort by city leaders that fails to hear the opinions of local educators and parents.

Higher Education in Brazil: Students and investors are profiting from the growth of private universities

Students in Brazil's public universities are still whiter and richer than average, and much more likely to have been privately schooled. And taxpayers still pick up their tab, spending five times as much per university student as per schoolchild. But explosive growth in private, for-profit universities is at last opening up higher education (see chart).

In 2010, the latest year for which figures are available, there were around 2,400 universities or colleges of further education, of which only a tenth were public. Some of the rest were charitable, mostly Catholic. But three-quarters were run for profit, including the biggest five.

In the 80s, Neil Postman wrote, "You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content." To Postman, television was a medium that privileged entertainment, whose decontextualized method of communicating the ephemeral at blazing speeds made linear argument and true learning impossible.

Money gets top billing in education drama

In the last state budget, almost all the new spending went to medical programs. Olsen said that Tony Evers, the state superintendent of public instruction, has ideas that are worth discussing but won't have much of a chance if medical costs keep rising. (Not to mention the central issue of whether to increase state school aid.)

Dan Rossmiller, director of government relations for the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, responded, "Can you imagine us saying to the Medicaid program, you're only going to be able to spend 50 dollars more per patient next year than you did last year? That's pretty much unimaginable, yet that's what we do with education." Rossmiller said education funding reform is needed.

That morning's Journal Sentinel had a story that began: "Taxpayers need to chip in about $650 million more toward state health care programs for the poor and elderly during the next two-year budget cycle, Gov. Scott Walker's administration said."

I really want people to have access to necessary medical care, which so many people can't afford on their own. But I read that story and thought of the impact on schools (as well as other areas of state spending).

Sun Prairie Tax & Spending Climate: Compensation Discussions

The district office has been working on a document that compiles total compensation--not benefits mind you, strictly cash-in-your-wallet compensation. We heard about this at a recent HR Committee meeting (memo to people: you just may want to find time in your busy lives to start coming to some meetings). We asked about it this week and learned that the compilation is complete and we requested a copy. This study covers all professional educators and the "cash" compensation earned during the FY2011-12 school year.

We have pulled out several nuggets from the data; there are many more.
We have also taken the liberty of sorting the data by total compensation, showing base salary and "add-ons". A copy of this is available here:

The Writing Revolution

New Dorp's Writing Revolution, which placed an intense focus, across nearly every academic subject, on teaching the skills that underlie good analytical writing, was a dramatic departure from what most American students--especially low performers--are taught in high school. The program challenged long-held assumptions about the students and bitterly divided the staff. It also yielded extraordinary results. By the time they were sophomores, the students who had begun receiving the writing instruction as freshmen were already scoring higher on exams than any previous New Dorp class. Pass rates for the English Regents, for example, bounced from 67 percent in June 2009 to 89 percent in 2011; for the global-­history exam, pass rates rose from 64 to 75 percent. The school reduced its Regents-repeater classes--cram courses designed to help struggling students collect a graduation requirement--from five classes of 35 students to two classes of 20 students.

The number of kids enrolling in a program that allows them to take college-level classes shot up from 148 students in 2006 to 412 students last year. Most important, although the makeup of the school has remained about the same--­roughly 40 percent of students are poor, a third are Hispanic, and 12 percent are black--a greater proportion of students who enter as freshmen leave wearing a cap and gown. This spring, the graduation rate is expected to hit 80 percent, a staggering improvement over the 63 percent figure that prevailed before the Writing Revolution began. New Dorp, once the black sheep of the borough, is being held up as a model of successful school turnaround. "To be able to think critically and express that thinking, it's where we are going," says Dennis Walcott, New York City's schools chancellor. "We are thrilled with what has happened there."

Although New Dorp teachers had observed students failing for years, they never connected that failure to specific flaws in their own teaching. They watched passively as Deirdre De­Angelis got rid of the bad apples on the staff; won foundation money to break the school into smaller, more personalized learning communities; and wooed corporate partners to support after-school programs. Nothing seemed to move the dial.

Her decision in 2008 to focus on how teachers supported writing inside each classroom was not popular. "Most teachers," said Nell Scharff, an instructional expert DeAngelis hired, "entered into the process with a strongly negative attitude." They were doing their job, they told her hotly. New Dorp students were simply not smart enough to write at the high-school level. You just had to listen to the way the students talked, one teacher pointed out--they rarely communicated in full sentences, much less expressed complex thoughts. "It was my view that these kids didn't want to engage their brains," Fran Simmons, who teaches freshman English, told me. "They were lazy."

Should Teachers Be Allowed to Sell Their Lesson Plans?

You won't get rich as a teacher, right? That's no longer true for a small but growing number of educators who are making big bucks selling their lesson plans online. On a peer-to-peer site called TeachersPayTeachers (TPT), Georgia kindergarten teacher Deanna Jump has earned more than $1 million selling lesson plans -- with names like "Colorful Cats Math, Science and Literacy Fun!" -- for about $9 a pop. Since the site launched in 2006, 26 teachers have each made more than $100,000 on TPT, which takes a 15% commission on most sales. In August, Jump became the first on TPT to reach $1 million. Her success has been aided by the thousands of followers of her personal blog who get notified each time she retails a new lesson. Another reason she thinks her stuff sells so well: "I've used it in my classroom," says Jump, who just kicked off her 16th year of teaching. "I know it works."

Parents Seen Less Involved In Schools Report Shows Decline in Calls, Meetings

New city statistics are showing a steep decline in parent involvement in New York public schools, giving potential ammunition to critics who say the Department of Education under Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been unresponsive to families.

City officials attributed part of the plummet to a new data-collection system. But critics, including some possible mayoral contenders, said the numbers in the annual Mayor's Management Report were hard evidence of long-held frustrations by public-school parents.

I wonder if Madison PTO attendance patterns have changed? During the 2000's, most meetings that I observed or participated in typically had no more than 12 to 15 parents. Often less than 10 appeared.

One meeting sticks out. More than 50 parents attended a Thoreau PTO meeting which attempted to bring Singapore Math to the school. That was a spectacular failure, unfortunately.

Chicago Public Schools' Pension Crunch

I get annoyed when conservatives talking about the federal government running out of money, but listening to some progressive crowing about the outcome of the Chicago teachers strike it's also frustrating when people don't acknowledge that the city of Chicago most certainly can run out of money. Things like extra money for music and art teachers could be great ideas or could be bad ones depending on where it comes from. But it's not as if Chicago Public Schools is sitting on some giant pile of money that administrations have just been refusing to use. On the contrary, it's actually sitting on a large unfunded pension obligation:

That means the district's property tax levy would increase 3.47 percent, down from the 4.95 percent increase the board approved in June. The tax rate would be $11.71 per $1,000 of assessed value, down from $11.88. For an average $232,024 home, the difference is about $40.

The board could use the remaining $8.1 million on property tax relief, but Belmore is recommending it be used in other ways, including:

$3.7 million held in reserves, in case the state overestimated additional aid.

$1.6 million to buy iPads for use in the classroom, $650,000 to upgrade wireless bandwidth in all schools and $75,000 for an iPad coach.

$1.2 million to account for a projected increase in the district's contribution to the Wisconsin Retirement System.

About $800,000 geared toward closing achievement gaps including: three security assistants at Black Hawk, O'Keeffe and Hamilton middle schools; an assistant principal at Stephens Elementary, where the district's Work and Learn alternative program caused parent concerns last year; two teacher leaders to assist with the district's literacy program; a high school math interventionist; increasing the number of unassigned positions from 13.45 to 18.45 to align with past years; and a new student agricultural program.

3. It was moved by James Howard and seconded by Beth Moss that the pending motion to approve the preliminary 2012-2013 School District budget be amended to include specific accountability measures for all reading intervention programs receiving funding pursuant to 2012-2013 budget allocations. Specifically, in order for any reading intervention program being funded during the 2012-2013 school year to receive continued and/or increased funding in future budgets, each intervention must:

a. By November 15, 2012, submit to the Board of Education, proposed progress indicators for improved student achievement for students of color.

b. Progress indicators will be defined on a yearly basis for a minimum of 5 years and compared to the initial year of 2011-12.

c. Progress indicators will be broken down by African-American, Hispanic, special education and other non-White students affected by the program.

d. Progress indicators will include not only student achievement measures but also number of students included.

e. Data for each progress indicator will be required before continued or additional funding is approved.

The Madison School District Administration's Recommended Handbook Development Process

2)Taking into account survey results, Administration informs Board:
a) What legally has to change for the handbook.

b) What policies or practices set forth in CBAs are recommended to be carried forward as Board policy without change.

c) What policies or practices set forth in CBAs are recommended to be addressed as Board policy but should be reviewed and possibly changed.

d) What policies or practices set forth in CBAs are recommended not to be carried forward as Board policy.

The Administration's recommendations are presented at a meeting of the Board's Operational Support Committee on October 8. At a full meeting of the Board on October 29, the Board votes on the policies or practices to be submitted to designated working groups for discussion and collaborative exploration intended to culminate in consensus agreement on recommended approaches to the policies or practices.

The University of California backs a tax hike to support its ever-expanding bureaucracy

The University of California, San Diego has done it again. Last year, it announced the creation of a new diversity sinecure: a vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion. Campus leaders established this post even as state budget cuts resulted in the loss of star scientists to competing universities, as humanities classes and degree programs were eliminated to save money, and as tuition continued its nearly 75 percent, five-year rise. The new vice chancellorship was wildly redundant with UCSD's already-existing diversity infrastructure. As the campus itself acknowledges: "UC San Diego currently has many active diversity programs and initiatives." No kidding. A partial list of those "active diversity programs and initiatives" may be accessed here.

Now UCSD has filled the position and announced the new vice chancellor's salary. Linda Greene, a diversity bureaucrat and law professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will pull in $250,000 a year in regular salary, but that's just the beginning: she'll receive both a relocation allowance of $60,000 and 100 percent reimbursement of all moving expenses, a temporary housing allowance of $13,500, two fully paid house-hunting trips for two to the San Diego area, and reimbursement for all business visits to the campus before her start date in January 2013. (By comparison, an internationally known expert in opto-electronics in UCSD's engineering school, whose recent work has focused on cancer nanotechnology, received a little over $150,000 in salary from UCSD in 2011, according to state databases.) The UCSD press office did not respond to a request for the amount the university paid the "women-owned executive search firm with a diverse consulting team" it used to find Greene.

A politically embarrassing strike

Over the past eight years Chicago teachers have done well, securing raises averaging 7% a year with no changes to their terms. The main sticking points now are teacher evaluations, compensation and the rehiring of teachers who have been laid off. These last two issues are the most significant hurdles (Mr Emanuel would like schools to be able to hire the best teachers, not the most recently-fired ones). But to keep the strike legal, the unions must insist that it is about nothing more than pay and benefits.

A. [A] proposed charter school that is unlikely to attract a student body whose composition of racial and ethnic minorities, students with disabilities, students with limited English proficiency, and students from low-income families that is within 10% of the population for each of these sub-groups within the community or communities intended to be served by the charter school is presumed to be invalid;

B. The applicant can overcome this presumption by providing clear and convincing evidence that the charter school will satisfy the policy goal of providing equal educational opportunity for all students; and

C. Evidence of the support of parents for the proposed school approach may be considered but shall not be the primary evidence that the school positively serves the public's interests and is therefore insufficient by itself to overcome this presumption of invalidity.

Comments on the Pending Wisconsin School Report Cards

New benchmarks for proficiency. Starting in 2012-13, the benchmark for determining proficiency on the WKCE in math and reading will increase. New cut scores are being developed based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is conducted in a sample of schools every other year in Grades 4 and 8.

This higher cut score will result in a large number of students that will no longer be identified as proficient or advanced. This will be true at the state and local level. Recent coverage in the Wisconsin State Journal indicates that using NAEP-based cut scores causes the percent of Wisconsin students identified as proficient or advanced to decline from 81.9% to 35.8% for reading and from 78.0% to 48.1% for math.

The move toward NAEP-based cut scores is in part preparation for the statewide shift to Smarter Balanced Assessment in 2014-15. Results for individual schools using this new benchmark will be released this fall.

Accountability School Report Cards. Information packets from DPI provide context and formatting examples of the report cards that each school will receive to track its performance against various criteria.

Embargoed draft versions of school report cards will be shared with districts around September 24. Report cards for individual schools for 2011-12 will be finalized and made public around October 6.

Attached is an example of a school report card for a middle school. The report cards apply to all elementary, middle and high schools. Criteria are broken out by racial/ethnic, disability, income and ELL subgroup. More detailed "technical report cards" will also be prepared for each school that will go into more detail and methodology of the calculations.

Illinois & Wisconsin Teacher Union Climate

THE MTI Board of Directors voted to support their brothers and sisters of the Chicago Teachers Union not only because of CTU's support of those protesting Gov. Scott Walker's anti-public employee legislation in early 2011, but because their strike is over very similar issues.

Like Gov. Walker, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is trying to break the union, trying to defuse their power in bargaining and trying to weaken their political power. In Chicago, the mayor appoints the school board, so the board is responsible to him, not the public. He wants to privatize schools, and one way to justify that is to increase class size so the public schools fail. When they fail, he can move to private, for-profit charter schools.

Mayor Emanuel, like Gov. Walker, is taking the just-cause standard and due process from the Chicago teachers. This would enable termination "just because" he or a school administrator wishes, not because of a just-cause standard that can withstand due process of law.

A Digital Tool to Unlock Learning

When we think about education reform, we usually focus on teacher quality. The big battleground in education revolves around holding teachers accountable for their performance. With all the focus on teachers, however, one group that is often forgotten as a key learning resource are the students themselves.

One way to help students gain agency over their own education is through technology. Despite the Internet revolution, the field of K-12 education has been relatively slow to respond to digital media. That's why I paid a visit last week to the site of a promising experiment in digital learning in New York: the Bea Fuller Rodgers Middle School in Washington Heights.

Last year, CFY, a nonprofit organization, provided home computers (and arranged for discounted broadband access) to every one of the sixth grade students in the school. (Almost all the school's families are Hispanics who qualify for the federal government's free or reduced lunch program. Currently, half of all Hispanics in the United States lack broadband.).

Time for a Time Out: Why Are 40,000 Children So Harshly Disciplined in Public Schools?

Locked in cramped, windowless rooms, tied in body-restricting bags, denied food, water and bathroom access: all of this is happening not to patients in the overlooked back wards of state mental hospitals, but to children as young as 5 in American public schools.

In the 2009-10 school year, some 40,000 children were restrained or isolated as discipline for bad behavior -- most of these students had physical, developmental or learning and behavioral needs -- according to Department of Education data. That research was cited in a revealing op-ed in Sunday's New York Times written by a father whose daughter was deeply traumatized by such treatment. A 2009 Government Accountability Office report also found "hundreds of cases of alleged abuse and death related to the use of these methods on school children during the past two decades," in both public and private schools.

September 20, 2012

Big difference in price of book lists at many Hong Kong schools

A survey on textbooks showed a huge gap in prices between different schools' book lists. The school with the least expensive book list for Primary One charges only HK$509, while the most expensive list costs more than six times as much, at HK$3,089.

The council said the big difference was due to the number of books that schools want students to buy. Some ask students to only buy books for Chinese, English, maths and liberal studies, while others also ask students to buy books for computer studies, music, Putonghua and religious studies, and exercise and story books. The Education Bureau said it was concerned about the difference in prices and it would continue to monitor the amounts spent at different schools.

The price for primary textbooks has gone up by 2.2 per cent, and secondary school book prices are up 2.5 per cent. The average cost for secondary textbooks this school year is HK$2,186. The increase is greatest in Forms One, Two and Five. Book costs rose for all forms except for Form Six which saw their costs drop 2 per cent. The council says this decrease was due to the fact that sixth-formers used the fewest textbooks.

Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century

When Jonathan Goldman arrived for work in June 2006 at LinkedIn, the business networking site, the place still felt like a start-up. The company had just under 8 million accounts, and the number was growing quickly as existing members invited their friends and colleagues to join. But users weren't seeking out connections with the people who were already on the site at the rate executives had expected. Something was apparently missing in the social experience. As one LinkedIn manager put it, "It was like arriving at a conference reception and realizing you don't know anyone. So you just stand in the corner sipping your drink--and you probably leave early."

Goldman, a PhD in physics from Stanford, was intrigued by the linking he did see going on and by the richness of the user profiles. It all made for messy data and unwieldy analysis, but as he began exploring people's connections, he started to see possibilities. He began forming theories, testing hunches, and finding patterns that allowed him to predict whose networks a given profile would land in. He could imagine that new features capitalizing on the heuristics he was developing might provide value to users. But LinkedIn's engineering team, caught up in the challenges of scaling up the site, seemed uninterested. Some colleagues were openly dismissive of Goldman's ideas. Why would users need LinkedIn to figure out their networks for them? The site already had an address book importer that could pull in all a member's connections.

Luckily, Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn's cofounder and CEO at the time (now its executive chairman), had faith in the power of analytics because of his experiences at PayPal, and he had granted Goldman a high degree of autonomy. For one thing, he had given Goldman a way to circumvent the traditional product release cycle by publishing small modules in the form of ads on the site's most popular pages.

A student with 20/20 vision

Among the 116,173 high-school graduates who took university entrance exams last June, Olga Koutsika came first.

She got a perfect 20 out of 20 in biology, Ancient Greek, Latin, literature and history. Modern Greek was the only exam she did not manage to get full marks: 19.3. Contrary to what you tend to think, she did not spend nights and days glued to her desk - instead she dedicated several hours each week to practising her beloved ballet.

In an interview to the Athens News, Koutsika speaks about her hopes and dreams and reveals the origins of her success.

Do You Really Want To Know Your Baby's Genetics?

Boy or girl? This you can easily discover, but wouldn't you like to know more? If you could peer into your baby's medical future, what traits would you most want assurance about?

Most parents wouldn't hesitate: a healthy child. Soon science will be able to help them with that more quickly, completely--and safely--than ever before.

In June, a team at the University of Washington in Seattle announced a new technique that enables the construction of a comprehensive genome sequence--a genetic "blueprint," as they described it--of the developing fetus from as early as the first trimester (Science Translational Medicine, vol 4, p 137ra76). The test could be available in clinics in as little as five years.

Teaching ate me alive

It wasn't one single incident that made me quit teaching in a public middle school. It was the steady, moldy accumulation of dehumanizing, lifeless, squalid misadventures of which I was a part. Like that time with "Carlos," to pick an incident more or less at random.

I can't even remember what it was that happened between Carlos and me. Anger, impatience, frustration, stupidity -- and that was just me. Probably just another student who categorically refused to do as he was perfectly reasonably asked -- open a book, pick up a pencil, hand in homework -- or a teacher's ineffectual attempts to come up with any good reason at all to learn the Pythagorean Theorem, or some such timeless knowledge. OK! Let's say you have a ladder leaning against a wall. Suffice to say, our "conversation" ended without closure. But, evidently I said something that upset Carlos.

The next day I saw my friend the Dean of Students. He told me that he ran into Carlos' father and a couple of his uncles; they were looking for my classroom. They had baseball bats. I am not the coach of the baseball team. There is no baseball team. In fact, there are no teams at all.

"If you see your name next to a student that might not be yours, it's because you are qualified to teach that subject, and we needed to put your name there," wrote K12 supervisor Samantha Gilormini in an e-mail.

Capelle refused, and now state officials are investigating whether K12 used improperly certified teachers and asked employees to cover it up.

Seminole County officials say this problem may reach far beyond their borders.

But many Florida school districts have no way to know whether K12 students are actually being taught by properly certified teachers, according to a review by StateImpact Florida and Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.

Ideally, all publicly funded school organizations should be managed with high expectations.

A Challenging School Year

Belmore told our editorial board last week one of her first priorities was to prioritize the existing list of priorities. We get it. And obviously student achievement is priority number one. But a new district employee handbook to replaces decades of negotiated contracts - which the Governor did away with, and a new teacher evaluation system that uses student performance as a measurement - look at what's happening in Chicago - will test Belmore, the school board and teachers in ways that will effect everyone in the Madison schools and beyond. We need everybody's best efforts right now, to protect public education and help our kids succeed. Education has to come before politics and Belmore has to lead and be allowed to lead.

September 19, 2012

Chicago's striking teachers flunk sympathy test

In the latest tiff between public-employee unions and cash-strapped governments, more than 350,000 Chicago children were shut out of classrooms for a second day Tuesday by striking teachers pursuing goals that are out of step with reality.

The teachers, who make an average $76,000 a year, are spurning an offer that includes a 16% pay increase over the next four years. In times of low inflation and 8.1% unemployment, you'd think that would be enough to get a deal done.

But that's just for starters. The teachers' main beef is about accountability. They don't want it, at least not the measurable kind. The school district does, and so the two are locked in a battle that's being repeated across the country. Even if the strike is settled by the time you read this, the outcome will help shape the quality of education across the USA.

How to Fix the Schools

"We have to find a way to work with teachers and unions while at the same time working to greatly raise the quality of teachers," he told me recently. He has some clear ideas about how to go about that. His starting point is not the public schools themselves but the universities that educate teachers. Teacher education in America is vastly inferior to many other countries; we neither emphasize pedagogy -- i.e., how to teach -- nor demand mastery of the subject matter. Both are a given in the top-performing countries. (Indeed, it is striking how many nonprofit education programs in the U.S. are aimed at helping working teachers do a better job -- because they've never learned the right techniques.)

What is also a given in other countries is that teaching has a status equal to other white-collar professionals. That was once true in America, but Tucker believes that a quarter-century of income inequality saw teachers lose out at the expense of lawyers and other well-paid professionals. That is a large part of the reason that teachers' unions have become so obstreperous: It is not just that they feel underpaid, but they feel undervalued. Tucker believes that teachers should be paid more -- though not exorbitantly. But making teacher education more rigorous -- and imbuing the profession with more status -- is just as important. "Other countries have raised their standards for getting into teachers' colleges," he told me. "We need to do the same."

The World's 10 most influential Languages

One hardly risks controversy with the statement that today English was a more influential language world-wide than Yanomami. To a child's question why that should be so, the well-informed parental brush-off would be that English had hundreds of millions of speakers while Yanomami could with difficulty scratch together 16,000. Really difficult and well-informed off-spring could then point out that in this case, Chinese would be the most important language of the world. At this point, the experienced parent would send the brat off to annoy someone else.

Every language, including Yanomami, is the most important language of the world - to its speakers. Rather than "important" we shall here, therefore, use the world "influential" in its stead. Chinese is a very influential language, no doubt about it, but is it more so than English? Clearly not. The number of speakers is relevant but quite insufficient for a meaningful ranking of languages in order of current world-wide influence, the stress being on the word "world-wide". There are many other factors to be taken into account and this is what we shall attempt to do in the following.

Ranking the world's current top languages is not just an idle past-time. The world is growing closer and this historical development is matched by large-scale linguistic adjustments, the most dramatic of which being the explosive growth of the English language. It does matter how major languages stand and evolve in relation to each other. Like the weather, many developments make sense only if one looks at the world-wide picture, not just parochial bits of it.

Young, Gifted and Neglected

BARACK OBAMA and Mitt Romney both attended elite private high schools. Both are undeniably smart and well educated and owe much of their success to the strong foundation laid by excellent schools.

Every motivated, high-potential young American deserves a similar opportunity. But the majority of very smart kids lack the wherewithal to enroll in rigorous private schools. They depend on public education to prepare them for life. Yet that system is failing to create enough opportunities for hundreds of thousands of these high-potential girls and boys.

Mostly, the system ignores them, with policies and budget priorities that concentrate on raising the floor under low-achieving students. A good and necessary thing to do, yes, but we've failed to raise the ceiling for those already well above the floor.

Public education's neglect of high-ability students doesn't just deny individuals opportunities they deserve. It also imperils the country's future supply of scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs.

Today's systemic failure takes three forms.

First, we're weak at identifying "gifted and talented" children early, particularly if they're poor or members of minority groups or don't have savvy, pushy parents.

Second, at the primary and middle-school levels, we don't have enough gifted-education classrooms (with suitable teachers and curriculums) to serve even the existing demand. Congress has "zero-funded" the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program, Washington's sole effort to encourage such education. Faced with budget crunches and federal pressure to turn around awful schools, many districts are cutting their advanced classes as well as art and music.

Third, many high schools have just a smattering of honors or Advanced Placement classes, sometimes populated by kids who are bright but not truly prepared to succeed in them.

Here and there, however, entire public schools focus exclusively on high-ability, highly motivated students. Some are nationally famous (Boston Latin, Bronx Science), others known mainly in their own communities (Cincinnati's Walnut Hills, Austin's Liberal Arts and Science Academy). When my colleague Jessica A. Hockett and I went searching for schools like these to study, we discovered that no one had ever fully mapped this terrain.

In a country with more than 20,000 public high schools, we found just 165 of these schools, known as exam schools. They educate about 1 percent of students. Nineteen states have none. Only three big cities have more than five such schools (Los Angeles has zero). Almost all have far more qualified applicants than they can accommodate. Hence they practice very selective admission, turning away thousands of students who could benefit from what they have to offer. Northern Virginia's acclaimed Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, for example, gets some 3,300 applicants a year -- two-thirds of them academically qualified -- for 480 places.

We built a list, surveyed the principals and visited 11 schools. We learned a lot. While the schools differ in many ways, their course offerings resemble A.P. classes in content and rigor; they have stellar college placement; and the best of them expose their pupils to independent study, challenging internships and individual research projects.

Critics call them elitist, but we found the opposite. These are great schools accessible to families who can't afford private schooling or expensive suburbs. While exam schools in some cities don't come close to reflecting the demographics around them, across the country the low-income enrollment in these schools parallels the high school population as a whole. African-American youngsters are "overrepresented" in them and Asian-Americans staggeringly so (21 percent versus 5 percent in high schools overall). Latinos are underrepresented, but so are whites.

That's not so surprising. Prosperous, educated parents can access multiple options for their able daughters and sons. Elite private schools are still out there. So are New Trier, Scarsdale and Beverly Hills. The schools we studied, by and large, are educational oases for families with smart kids but few alternatives.

They're safe havens, too -- schools where everyone focuses on teaching and learning, not maintaining order. They have sports teams, but their orchestras are better. Yes, some have had to crack down on cheating, but in these schools it's O.K. to be a nerd. You're surrounded by kids like you -- some smarter than you -- and taught by capable teachers who welcome the challenge, teachers more apt to have Ph.D.'s or experience at the college level than high school instructors elsewhere. You aren't searched for weapons at the door. And you're pretty sure to graduate and go on to a good college.

Many more students could benefit from schools like these -- and the numbers would multiply if our education system did right by such students in the early grades. But that will happen only when we acknowledge that leaving no child behind means paying as much attention to those who've mastered the basics -- and have the capacity and motivation for much more -- as we do to those who cannot yet read or subtract.

It's time to end the bias against gifted and talented education and quit assuming that every school must be all things to all students, a simplistic formula that ends up neglecting all sorts of girls and boys, many of them poor and minority, who would benefit more from specialized public schools. America should have a thousand or more high schools for able students, not 165, and elementary and middle schools that spot and prepare their future pupils.

With their support for school choice, Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama have both edged toward recognizing that kids aren't all the same and schools shouldn't be, either. Yet fear of seeming elitist will most likely keep them from proposing more exam schools. Which is ironic and sad, considering where they went to school. Smart kids shouldn't have to go to private schools or get turned away from Bronx Science or Thomas Jefferson simply because there's no room for them.

Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, is the author, with Jessica A. Hockett, of "Exam Schools: Inside America's Most Selective Public High Schools."

On Wednesday, June 13, Nayeem ­Ahsan walked into a fourth-floor classroom at Stuyvesant High School with some two dozen other students to take a physics test--one of a number of Regents Exams that many New York State high-school juniors are required to take. Small and skinny with thick black hair and a bright, shy smile, Nayeem is 16. Like many ­teenage boys, he seems to straddle two worlds: One moment you see a man, ­another a boy.

The son of Bangladeshi immigrants, Nayeem was born in Flushing Hospital and raised in Jackson Heights, a 35-­minute subway ride to Stuyvesant in lower Manhattan. In the academically elite world of Stuyvesant, Nayeem maintains solid if unremarkable grades, and is a friendly, popular-enough kid known to take photographs of sports teams after school and post them on Facebook. When he walked into the exam room that morning, he seemed confident and calm. Nothing about him suggested he was about to pull off the most brazen feat of cheating in the illustrious school's 107-year history.

Nayeem had cased the room beforehand. His iPhone had spotty service inside Stuyvesant, and he wanted to be sure he'd have a signal. He tested the device in the second seat of the first row--he'd assumed he would be seated alphabetically--and it worked. He tried out the second seat counting from the other side of the room just to be safe--also good. Then he examined the sight lines to both seats from the teacher's desk--what could the proctor see and not see?--and checked out the seats where he thought some of his friends would be sitting. One was right in front of the teacher. He made a note of that. That kid was out.

Column: Top grads want to teach. Why don't they get hired?

The fight to upgrade the quality of the nation's teaching force has just begun. Years from now, the Chicago strike most likely will be viewed as a canary-in-the-coal-mine incident.

The awkward fact is that teaching in America has become a quasi blue-collar profession mostly shunned by top college graduates. The countries with the best education systems recruit from top graduates. What about our top graduates? A good barometer is Teach for America (TFA), which in 2011 drew nearly 48,000 applicants for 5,200 teaching positions. Those applicants included 12% of the seniors at Ivy League schools.

Here's the question that never gets asked: What happens to the 43,000 top graduates who wanted to teach but didn't get an offer from TFA? Nearly all seek other careers.

For the best and brightest college graduates in this country, jobs offered by regular school districts lack prestige. Their accountability-free practices give the best teachers no way to stand out. These young TFA applicants rose to the top of their high schools classes and won admittance to the top tier colleges. They want a shot at shining on the job as well.

Wrangle over Wisconsin union law will keep courts busy

Gov. Scott Walker's curbs on collective bargaining were overturned even before they took effect last year, quickly reinstated by the state Supreme Court, scaled back in March by a federal judge and, on Friday, dealt a major blow by a Dane County judge.

Expect nothing but more court decisions in the months ahead as appeals on those last two cases are heard and others are sorted out by the court system.

Defending those cases has cost taxpayers about $675,000 so far, and those expenses will only increase.

Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen said Monday he will seek a stay on Tuesday of the latest ruling and will soon appeal the case.

Meanwhile, two challenges to the law are pending in the federal courts. William Conley, a federal judge in the western district of Wisconsin, in March struck down parts of Walker's law, and his decision will be reviewed Sept. 24 during oral arguments before the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago. That appeals court could rule before the end of the year.

Conley has yet to rule on a separate case before him that makes arguments similar to the ones that resulted in Friday's decision by Dane County Circuit Judge Juan Colas. If Conley sides with the unions, Walker would have to overcome two sets of rulings; if Conley sides with Walker, the unions may have a tougher time defending their position in state court.

What's so 'objectionable' about a teacher survey?

The Madison School Board on Monday approved using an employee survey as part of its potential process for devising new employee work rules, although such a tool would be illegal if the state's collective bargaining law is overturned, district lawyer Matt Bell said.

The School Board agreed not to issue the survey until the legal uncertainties related to last week's court ruling overturning key parts of the state's new collective bargaining law, known as Act 10, are resolved.

Prior to Friday's ruling, Superintendent Jane Belmore told the board the survey results would be collected and analyzed by the Wisconsin Association of School Boards at a cost of $1,000.

The survey would ask respondents whether they "strongly disagree," "disagree," "agree," "strongly agree" or have "no opinion" about questions such as "The hours I work are reasonable" and "Layoffs should be based on seniority."

Madison Teachers Inc. executive director John Matthews said the union is opposed to the district using an employee survey.

"Let's have people who teachers already trust providing that input," Matthews said.

The United States has never ranked at the top of international education tests, since we began comparing countries in 1964, yet has been the dominant economic and innovative force in the world the entire time. Despite this fact, a popular annual education report has once again stoked fears of America's impending economic mediocrity with fresh stats on how far the U.S. "lags" behind the world in college attainment, pre-school enrollment, and high school graduation.

The reason for the apparent disconnect is because schools don't prepare students for the real world, so broad educational attainment will have a weak correlation with economic power. Research has consistently shown that on nearly every measure of education (instructional hours, class-size, enrollment, college preparation), what students learn in school does not translate into later life success. The United States has an abundance of the factors that likely do matter: access to the best immigrants, economic opportunity, and the best research facilities.

Milwaukee Public Schools' retiree benefit costs drop by $1 billion

The latest actuarial valuation of the district's nonpension benefit obligation was conducted by consultants Gabriel Roeder Smith & Co. If the conditions upon which the report is framed stay in place, MPS is predicted to face a $1.8 billion liability by the year 2019 instead of a $4.9 billion liability.

"This is an important step upon which we will continue to build," Milwaukee Public School Board President Michael Bonds said in a statement provided by MPS.

The road to lower long-term health care costs started in late 2010, when the district finalized contracts with unions that called for a new health care plan administrator.

Under Act 10, the School Board in November 2011 approved increasing the health care premium contributions from employees, increasing the age and years of service needed to be eligible for the district's retiree health benefits and increasing the amount of sick leave that needed to be accumulated in order for the board to subsidize the benefit.

Coursera on-line classes and the future of learning...

Ten years from now a "college education" is going to look radically different from when I went to school. And I think that's a good thing, especially when you consider the skyrocketing costs of "higher education" and the miserable job market that recent graduates have faced.

This all started for me when I first saw MIT's Open Courseware and then when Standford offered a few Computer Science courses on-line. I had actually signed up for Andrew Ng's Machine Learning class but never made time in my schedule to participate. Since then, Andrew and Daphne Koller have kicked things up a notch by starting Coursera. They've built a platform that allows instructors to distribute their courses to many, many people on-line at a very low cost.

Three Things Colleges Don't Want Us to Know

Universities are in the knowledge business, and the creation and dissemination of it is at the very core of what colleges do. Yet some forms of knowledge about higher education itself are either unknown, or hidden from the public. Why? Release of the information would prove embarrassing and possibly even costly to the school.

1. What Are the Teaching Loads?

This is prompted by an email I received from Bill Armstrong, President of Colorado Christian College and former two-term U.S. Senator. He is looking for data on faculty teaching loads and cannot find it. Going to the latest Digest of Education Statistics, I learn that there were 7,500 faculty members teaching agricultural or home economics courses in 2003 between the ages of 35 and 39, or that there were 1,959 full-time equivalent faculty teaching in Delaware in 2009. But in over 20 tables on staffing, there is not a word on teaching loads.

Why? I suspect the reason is simple: faculty don't teach very much, and far less than they used to. I have been around higher education for over 50 years, and my recollection is that at middling quality state schools in the early 1960s, most faculty taught around 12 hours a week. At those same schools today, the average load is almost certainly not more than 9 hours. At top-flight universities, faculty taught about six hours a week in the 1960s, and often 3 hours or 4.5 hours (one semester, one course, the second semester, two courses) now. On average, we have seen at least a 25 percent reduction in loads.

Annoucing Mr. Buchhauser's Final Season

Dear WYSO Members and Families,
For the past 30 years, Mr. Tom Buchhauser has served as an exemplary music educator for over 1700 students who have played in WYSO's Philharmonia Orchestra. At the end of the 2012-2013 season, Mr. Buchhauser will bring his productive and inspiring career at WYSO to a close.
In addition to his 30 seasons with WYSO, Mr. Buchhauser taught at Madison Memorial High School from 1966-1999, played cello for Madison Symphony Orchestra for nearly 20 years, served on the faculty of the National String Workshop for ten years and directed ensembles for the UW School of Music Pre-College Institute, the Madison Community Orchestra and the Madison Symphony Steenbock Young Artist Concerto Concerts.
He has received numerous awards for his excellence in teaching, including the Wisconsin Music Educators Conference Distinguished Service Award (1983), the National School Orchestra Association Director of the Year Award (1993), the American String Teachers Association Outstanding Service Award (1993), the Rabin Youth Arts Award (2001), and has scholarships named in his honor by the WSMA Honors Project, WYSO, and Madison Memorial High School. In 1999, Madison Metropolitan School District named the Memorial High School auditorium the "Thomas E. Buchhauser Auditorium."
Mr. Buchhauser recently shared, "I have had many teachers and experiences that have shaped my life as a musician, teacher and conductor but none so profound as Marvin Rabin's coming to Madison in 1966 to start WYSO and David Nelson asking me to be Associate Music Director of WYSO in 1983. It has been an honor to be part of such a great organization and I will be forever grateful to WYSO for all that it has given to me."
We will treasure this final season with Mr. Buchhauser and applaud his tremendous efforts to embody the WYSO mission of enriching lives by providing transformational music experiences and opportunities.
Bridget Fraser
Bridget Fraser, Executive Director
Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestras
455 No. Park Street
Humanities Building, Room 1625
Madison, WI 53706
608-263-3320 Ext 14
bfraser@wyso.music.wisc.edu
http://wyso.music.wisc.edu

Teacher garners public sympathy after writing 'seditious' essays

If not for his heart attack in 2005, Chen Pingfu would still be a maths teacher, leading an ordinary life in Lanzhou, Gansu province.

That misfortune was followed by several more. Having no medical insurance from the state or his college, the 55-year-old fell into debt paying for his operation. Then he lost his job when his state factory-affiliated college closed in 2008.

Without an income, he turned to playing violin on the street for money - an act regarded as begging on the mainland. Police and officials would rough him up. But the experience opened Chen's eyes to how people at the bottom of society are often abused.

Are ADHD Medications Overprescribed?

In recent years, the number of children in the U.S. being treated with prescription medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has grown dramatically.

That trend has led to concern among some doctors, parents and child advocates that many children are taking ADHD medication unnecessarily.

These critics suggest that in many cases ADHD is a mistaken diagnosis for children who are simply immature or undisciplined. And even when the diagnosis is correct, they say, many children who are taking medication for ADHD could do as well or better with alternative treatments, including dietary and behavioral therapies, that have fewer side effects.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Democracies and Debt

For a long time, there did not seem to be any limit to the amount democracies could borrow. Creditors have been more patient with democratic governments than with other regimes, probably because the risk of abrupt changes of policy (like the repudiation of Tsarist debts by Russia in 1917) are reduced. But this has postponed the crunch point, rather than eliminated it--and allowed stable democracies to accumulate higher debt, relative to their GDP, than many, more volatile countries ever achieved. Governments can, as Madison suggested, confiscate the wealth of domestic creditors via inflation, taxes or default. But however often they vote, democracies cannot make foreign lenders extend credit. That harsh truth is now being discovered.

WeTakeYourClass.com

You are struggling with your online classes or homework and you want someone to do it for you. We can handle almost any subject and customer service is a priority. Our company culture revolves around making sure you feel safe and satisfied knowing that your work is being done by an expert within your specified deadline. We are here to serve you around the clock by email, live chat, and phone. For all of your academic needs, WeTakeYourClass wants to be the one you turn to time and time again.

A review of The Language Wars: A History of Proper English

The language wars date from the beginning of language--the beginning, one suspects, of every language. A language is invented, new words added, a grammar devised, an approved syntax established, and in one of countless possible ways it proves inadequate, opponents gather, snipers fire verbal shots, polemical grenades are flung, canons lined up, and war is underway. The reigning rule of language is change, endless bloody change; it was forever thus, and always will be. Case--far from closed--permanently open.

In his richly informative book Henry Hitchings chronicles the language wars of English, its continuous skirmishes, its controversies, its often rancorous disputes. The Language Wars is impressively comprehensive, its author immensely knowledgeable. He takes up the subjects of spelling, grammar, punctuation, pronunciation, metaphor, regional speech, jargon, the influence on language of the internet, and profanity, both lyrical and gross. One cannot but admire his learning and high spirits as he makes his way through material that in a less deft hand would have drooped into pedantry or become inflamed with bad temper.

In writing about language one must prove that one can oneself manipulate language. Hitchings passes this test. His prose is lucid, nicely dappled with irony, and if not elegant then attractively virile. The only complaint I have against his prose style is that he tends to overuse the word "intriguing," and uses it to mean interesting, sometimes fascinating, thereby ignoring what for me is the word's root sense of making secret plans to do something illicit or harmful to someone. Spies have traditionally been thought to be intriguing, not authors of books on grammar and spelling. Many contemporary dictionaries approve Hitchings's use of the word, often these days according it primary position in their numerical list of definitions. But dictionaries, as we know, are cowardly institutions, which tend to go along with the changed meaning of words, and hence are not to be trusted.

Rahm Emanuel is his generation's most noted political pugilist, the guy who once mailed a dead fish to a fellow Democratic operative whose work had disappointed him. In 1992 he celebrated Bill Clinton's presidential victory with a steak knife and an enemies list, stabbing a table and screaming "dead" as he recited each name. Over time Mr. Emanuel's drive has made him a leader in Congress, chief of staff to President Obama and now the mayor of Chicago.

So you'd think that "Rahmbo" would be the perfect leader--a popular, bona fide progressive reformer unafraid to speak his mind--to stand up for students and parents by facing down the Chicago Teachers Union's first strike in 25 years. But when the teachers walked off the job on Monday and the strike wore on, the political force of nature seemed hesitant to brawl.

Sitting for an interview on Tuesday in a reception room overlooking Chicago's Millennium Park, with union members marching in the street, Mr. Emanuel presents himself as a man looking to make a deal. According to news reports at press time, he's likely to sign one this weekend.

Are We Getting Smarter?

Are we getting smarter? Moral philosopher James Flynn discovered in the 1980s that our IQ scores have been steadily rising since we began measuring intelligence. This became known as the Flynn Effect. Now he's making some interesting observations about intelligence and IQ in relation to the controversial questions of race, gender and class.

Dane County National Merit Semi-finalists

Seventy-eight students in the Dane County area and 330 students statewide are among about 16,000 high school seniors named 2013 National Merit Semifinalists, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation announced Wednesday.

Semifinalists represent the top 1 percent of the approximately 1.5 million students who took the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test last year. About 90 percent of semifinalists become finalists who are eligible to receive one of 8,300 college scholarships totaling more than $32 million next spring.

September 17, 2012

Madison teachers union to demand contract talks

The Madison teachers union will be demanding that the district begin new collective bargaining contract negotiations in light of a court ruling overturning parts of a state law that previously forbid it.

John Matthews, head of the Madison teachers union, said Monday that the request is likely to be sent to the district on Tuesday. District spokeswoman Rachel Strauch-Nelson had no immediate comment.

Madison school employees are currently covered under a union contract that ends on June 30, 2012. Typically, talks for the next two-year contract wouldn't begin until February.

Major changes to the manner in which teachers are evaluated in Wisconsin are on the horizon. The criteria for teacher evaluation which was first negotiated by MTI during a 1976 strike will be replaced effective with the 2014-15 school year by a state-mandated system and criteria. Driven by President Obama's "Race to the Top" initiative, teacher evaluation procedures are changing from those which relied primarily upon locally-developed evaluation procedures based on principal observations to state-mandated procedures requiring the inclusion of student test scores in the evaluation of teaching staff. The "Wisconsin Framework for Educational Effectiveness" is the new process required to be utilized by Wisconsin schools commencing with the 2014-15 school year. This new evaluation model will base teacher evaluations 50% on "models of practice" and 50% on "student outcomes". A summary of this model can be found at the DPI website at http://www.dpi.wi.gov/tepdl/edueff.html.

In preparation for the 2014-15 implementation of the new evaluation model, DPI will be piloting the program with select school districts during the 2012-13 school year. Feedback from that pilot will then be utilized for modifications for a state-wide pilot in 2013-14. Feedback from that effort will then be used to tweak some more before full implementation.
The MMSD and MTI have agreed to have Madison participate as one of the pilot districts this school year. This does not mean that MTI is supportive of the model as currently designed. There are elements to the plan which certainly present concerns to many educators, especially in light of dramatic eliminations of contractual protections caused by Act 10. However, given the current political landscape, both at the State and Federal level, this may very well be the plan we will have to work with in the foreseeable future. The MTI Board of Directors concluded that it was better to participate in the pilot and offer feedback than leave that to others, provided: 1) that MTI had a say in selecting which schools participate in the pilot; 2) that teacher participation in the pilot be entirely voluntary; and 3) that the pilot will only be used to provide feedback to DPI, the MMSD and MTI and will not be utilized to evaluate staff during the pilot period. The District agreed to these provisions (the latter two of which are also mandated by DPI as part of the pilot).

The school selected to participate in the pilot is Black Hawk Middle School. The Principal has been notified and volunteers have been selected to participate. The school team will include two to three teachers who have agreed to be "evaluated" (one of whom is required to be an initial educator); one peer mentor to do informal observations and offer coaching and feedback to teachers (whose work is essentially to support the development and expertise of the teacher without doing any formal observation); and the principal who will be conducting the formal observations and the evaluation . The participants will be required to attend a three (3) day DPI training October 8-10, with two more training days to be scheduled later in the year. Participants will also be asked to attend a couple of meetings with MMSD and MTI staff along the way to provide feedback to MMSD/MTI as well.

By participating, we are hopeful that the experience and feedback provided by the participants will be utilized to make any necessary modifications to the planned evaluation system so that it can deliver on its promise to fairly and accurately measure teacher effectiveness. If not, the experience will inform our concerns and critiques.

Training Teachers to Embrace Reform

Making sense of the Chicago teachers' strike (where the two sides were reportedly moving toward resolution on Friday) is like trying to understand the failure of a friend's marriage. You can't help speculating about who's to blame, but you'll never really know. In truth, it doesn't matter. Many countries have revolutionized their education systems in recent years, but not one of them has done it through strikes, walkouts or righteous indignation.

Just about every country in the developed world has a teachers' union, so the mere presence of a union doesn't determine the quality of a country's schools. There is, however, a significant relationship between the professionalism of the union and the health of an education system. The all-important issue is not how easy it is to fire the worst teachers; it's how to elevate the entire craft without going to war with teachers.

Chicago strike may not help students in the long run

After many months of difficult negotiations, the teachers' union and school system announced last week agreement on a new contract making student performance a factor in teachers' evaluations, giving school leaders more latitude in selecting teachers and keeping class sizes in middle grades in check.

In Chicago? Of course not.

So where? Boston.

While the Chicago teachers' strike, which closed public schools for the week, got huge national attention, the Boston settlement, after more than two years of negotiations (and no strike), got minimal notice. Everybody loves a fight, I suppose. But I would argue that what happened in Boston was at least as important as the grand battle in Chicago.

Why? Because I doubt much good is going to emerge from Chicago. It sounded at week's end as if negotiators were headed toward an agreement that won't really change the status quo very much - and the status quo for Chicago kids is about as happy as it is for Milwaukee kids.

Boston is much more in line with what is happening nationwide, including growing interest, even among many union leaders, in striving for improvements in teaching. It's a very complex and tricky path, but the willingness to explore it is, in itself, a positive thing. Wisconsin education leaders have been acting more in line with the Boston agreement than the Chicago brawl.

Computerized Tutors

Neil Heffernan was listening to his fiancée, Cristina Lindquist, tutor one of her students in mathematics when he had an idea. Heffernan was a graduate student in computer science, and by this point -- the summer of 1997 -- he had been working for two years with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University on developing computer software to help students improve their skills. But he had come to believe that the programs did little to assist their users. They were built on elaborate theories of the student mind -- attempts to simulate the learning brain. Then it dawned on him: what was missing from the programs was the interventions teachers made to promote and accelerate learning. Why not model a computer program on a human tutor like Lindquist?

Over the next few months, Heffernan videotaped Lindquist, who taught math to middle-school students, as she tutored, transcribing the sessions word for word, hoping to isolate what made her a successful teacher. A look at the transcripts suggests the difficulties he faced. Lindquist's tutoring sessions were highly interactive: a single hour might contain more than 400 lines of dialogue. She asked lots of questions and probed her student's answers. She came up with examples based on the student's own experiences. She began sentences, and her student completed them. Their dialogue was anything but formulaic.

Lindquist: Do you know how to calculate average driving speed?

Student: I think so, but I forget.

Lindquist: Well, average speed -- as your mom drove you here, did she drive the same speed the whole time?

Can the Chicago Teachers' Strike Fix Democratic Education Reform?

In 1960, when Albert Shanker and other members of New York City's teachers union sought collective bargaining rights, they set a strike date for Monday November 7, the day prior to the presidential election between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. The timing would provide maximum leverage, they reasoned, because the Democratic mayor, Robert Wagner, would not want to come down hard on striking teachers the day before the election. This strategy was vindicated when teachers won an agreement that led to bargaining rights after just a single day on strike.

The same logic surely crossed the mind of the shrewd president of the Chicago Teachers Union, Karen Lewis, who knew that calling a strike this week would be highly disruptive to President Barack Obama's reelection campaign. At a time when Obama is trying to rally his base, the strike reminded teachers across the country of his support for merit pay and nonunion charter schools--policies also backed by Obama's former chief of staff and the current mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel. And at a time when Obama is struggling in the campaign money chase, the strike negotiations have distracted Emanuel from helping the president raise dollars from wealthy donors. Both factors may help explain why the strike now appears close to settling.

But if the strike has been bad for Democratic presidential politics, it may ultimately be good for Democratic education policy, which for too long has aped right-wing rhetoric in the name of education reform. It can't hurt to force a leading Democrat like Emanuel to spend a little more time negotiating with actual teachers and a little less time wooing hedge fund managers, many of whom passionately back the education policies that rank-and-file teachers despise.

Saving our universities? New Humanist interviews AC Grayling

"I believe that a mature civilised society ought to be funding universities properly through tax. Students should go to university for nothing because it's an investment that society's making in itself." The words belong to Professor Anthony Grayling, Master of New College of the Humanities (NCH). This unashamedly elite private university - student fees £18,000 a year - is housed in an 18th-century mansion in Bedford Square, Bloomsbury, where its first students will be unpacking their suitcases and sticking up their Radiohead posters right about now.

Library as Platform

In May, 2007, Facebook was generating over 40 billion page views a month by providing its users with carefully constructed and controlled services. Yet on May 24, 2007 Mark Zuckerberg took the company in a new direction: developers outside of the company would be given access to many of the services and data at the heart of the work done by Facebook's own development team. These external developers would be empowered to build whatever independent applications they wanted. The result was an outburst of creativity resulting in thousands and then hundreds of thousands of non-Facebook applications that expanded Facebook's services and integrated it into other sites -- each app potentially making Facebook more valuable to its users.

Facebook is in many ways an anti-model for libraries, but from this one action libraries can learn much. On May 24, 2007, Facebook became a platform: a set of resources -- services, data, tools -- that enable independent developers to create applications. Interesting possibilities open up if we think of libraries as platforms...open platforms.

Milwaukee is wisely embracing charter schools

Say an enterprising kid in your neighborhood offers to mow your lawn for $50. Say he turns around and pays another kid $35 to mow your lawn. The lawn gets mowed, the kid who actually mows the lawn makes $35 and the enterprising kid makes $15.

Should you be upset that you paid $50 for a job that someone did for $35 or satisfied that the job you paid for was completed?

The way you answer that question probably explains how you feel about the Milwaukee Public Schools' increasing willingness to authorize charter schools. The insiders call them non-instrumentality charter schools, which means they are freed from many bureaucratic regulations and are staffed with nonunion teachers.

In the eyes of the state, an MPS nonunion charter student is just like any other MPS student. Last year, the district received $9,799 in state aid and local property tax for each MPS pupil, including those in nonunion charter schools. The School Board, however, sends only $7,775 per pupil to nonunion charter schools. Meaning, nonunion charter students generate over $2,000 more per-pupil in revenue than the district spends to educate them.

Madison district serves up new after-school dinner program

District officials say the dinner program will improve student nutrition, encourage more participation in after-school academic programs and eventually lead to community dinners that will welcome more parents into the schools.

"What's kind of unique about it is these are creative ways to help districts close the achievement gap," food services director Steve Youngbauer said.

Unlike the lunch program, eligibility for a free dinner is based on whether the school qualifies for the program based on school poverty rates, rather than the income level of an individual student. So any student participating in an eligible after-school program can eat the dinner meal for free.

The program, starting at Falk, Black Hawk Middle School and Memorial High School this year, will eventually include hot meals and a salad bar. It's projected to cost $65,000 for the three schools this year, with the cost covered by a $2.86 per-meal federal subsidy.

September 16, 2012

Randall Elementary School has one of the lowest poverty rates and some of the highest test scores in Madison. It also has the most experienced teaching staff in the district.

By contrast, Sandburg Elementary has one of the higher poverty rates and some of the lowest test scores. It also has the least experienced teaching staff.

Across the district, schools with higher concentrations of poverty are more likely to have teachers with less experience, according to a State Journal analysis of Madison School District data.

Experts say that while more experience doesn't guarantee higher quality, teachers often need five to 10 years to reach their peak effectiveness.

"To consistently and disproportionately give the kids who need the most help people who aren't at their best yet just disadvantages them," said Sarah Almy, director of teacher quality for the Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.,-based group that advocates for raising student achievement.

I quickly compiled the following charts (PDF version) from the 2011-2012 Madison School District's MAP (Measurement of Academic Progress) math and reading results for Randall and Sandburg Elementary along with the District-wide results.

I added Randall, Sandburg's and the Madison school district's 3rd Friday, 2011 enrollment to the charts via the green rectangles. For example, the report states that 30 Sandburg 3rd grader's took the MAP assessment while the District's enrollment counts report 44 students in that class.

Who Is Victimizing Chicago's Kids?

Yes, schoolchildren in Chicago are victims, but not of their teachers. They are victims of a nationwide education "reform" movement geared to undermine teachers' unions and shift public resources into private hands; they are victims of wave after wave of ill-conceived and failing policy "innovations"; they are victims of George Bush's No Child Left Behind law, which turned inner-city public schools into boot camps for standardized test prep; they are victims of Barack Obama's Race to the Top program, which paid states to use student test scores--a highly unreliable tool--for teacher evaluations and to lift caps on the number of privately managed charter schools, thus draining resources from public schools. Chicago's children are victims of "mayoral control," which allows Rahm Emanuel to run the school system, bully parents and teachers, and appoint a Board of Education dominated by corporate executives and political donors.

Unsure robots make better teachers than know-alls

The best way to learn is to teach. Now a classroom robot that helps Japanese children learn English has put that old maxim to the test.

Shizuko Matsuzoe and Fumihide Tanaka at the University of Tsukuba, Japan, set up an experiment to find out how different levels of competence in a robot teacher affected children's success in learning English words for shapes.

They observed how 19 children aged between 4 and 8 interacted with a humanoid Nao robot in a learning game in which each child had to draw the shape that corresponded to an English word such as 'circle', 'square', 'crescent', or 'heart'.

The researchers operated the robot from a room next to the classroom so that it appeared weak and feeble, and the children were encouraged to take on the role of carers. The robot could then either act as an instructor, drawing the correct shape for the child, or make mistakes and act as if it didn't know the answer.

UW-Madison lab works with controversial data for Chicago schools

Nearly 30,000 public school teachers and support staff went on strike in Chicago this past week in a move that left some 350,000 students without classes to attend.

And while this contentious battle between Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union blew up due to a range of issues -- including compensation, health care benefits and job security concerns -- one of the key sticking points reportedly was over the implementation of a new teacher evaluation system.

That's noteworthy locally because researchers with UW-Madison's Value Added Research Center (VARC) have been collaborating with the Chicago Public Schools for more than five years now in an effort to develop a comprehensive program to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of schools and teachers in that district.

But Rob Meyer, the director of VARC, says his center has stayed above the fray in this showdown between the Chicago teachers and the district, which appears close to being resolved.

"The controversy isn't really about the merits of value-added and what we do," says Meyer. "So we've simply tried to provide all the stakeholders in this discussion the best scientific information we can so everybody knows what they're talking about."

Wisconsin School District Surpluses Reach $1,860,000,000 in 2010-2011

Total school district surpluses in Wisconsin reached $1.86 billion at the end of the 2010-11 school year, according to a new report from the nonpartisan Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance (WISTAX).

This continues an upward trend that began in 2003, when those combined "fund balances" stood at $1.20 billion. Since then, districts have increased their combined reserves an average of 5.6% per year. They rose 6.1%, from $1.76 billion to $1.86 billion, during 2011.

Looked at a second way, total fund balances equaled 17.9% of school spending in 2011. However, this percentage ranged widely by district, an indication that Wisconsin school health varies considerably. Of 423 districts, 144 had reserves that were 25% or more of expenditures, a sign of fiscal strength, caution, or both.

September 15, 2012

There's a Simple Solution to the Public Schools Crisis

It's an oft-noted irony of the confrontation in Chicago that Mayor Rahm Emanuel sends his children to the private, $20,000-a-year University of Chicago Lab School, which means his family doesn't really have much of a personal stake in what happens to the school system he is trying to reform. This is pretty routine behavior for rich people in Chicago, and there's a pretty good reason for it: Chicago's public schools are terrible. If you care about your children's education, and can afford to buy your way out of public schools, as Emanuel can, it's perfectly reasonable to do so. Barack and Michelle Obama made a similar decision, opting to purchase a quality education for their daughters at Sidwell Friends rather than send them to one of Washington, D.C.'s, deeply troubled public schools.

A lot of Chicago parents with the resources to do so have followed Emanuel's lead: 17% of schoolchildren in Chicago attend private schools, and so don't have to trouble themselves with whether or not their local public school has air conditioning, or a library (160 do not), or classes with 45 students. Those kids that don't attend private schools tend overwhelmingly to be from families with less political power and resources than Emanuel's: 87% of them are from low-income families, and 86% are black or hispanic.

Most students not proficient in writing, test finds

Just a quarter of eighth and 12th grade students in the United States have solid writing skills, even when allowed to use spell-check and other computer word-processing tools, according to results of a national exam [NAEP} released Friday.

Twenty-seven percent of students at each grade level were able to write essays that were well-developed, organized, and had proper language and grammar-3 percent were advanced and 24 percent were proficient. The remainder showed just partial mastery of these skills.

"It is important to remember this is first draft writing," said Cornelia Orr, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which administers the Nation's Report Card tests. "They did have some time to edit, but it wasn't extensive editing."

Students who took the writing test in 2011 had an advantage that previous test takers did not: a computer with spell-check and thesaurus. Previously, students taking the National Assessment of Educational Progress writing test had to use pencil and paper, but with changes in technology, and the need to write across electronic formats, the decision was made to switch to computers.

Orr said students use technology and tools like spell-check on a daily basis. "It's as if we had given them a pencil to write the essay and took away the eraser," she said.

She said word processing tools alone wouldn't result in significantly better writing scores if students didn't have the core skills of being able to organize ideas and present them in a clear and grammatical fashion.

Still, students in both grades who used the thesaurus and the backspace more frequently had higher scores than those who used them less often. Students in the 12th grade who had to write four or five pages a week for English homework also had higher scores.

Because this was the first version of the computerized test, the board cautioned against comparing the results to previous exams. In 2007, 33 percent of eighth grade students scored at the proficient level, which represents solid writing skills, as did 24 percent at grade 12.

The results at both grade levels showed a continued achievement gap between white, black, Hispanic, and Asian students.

There was also a gender gap, with girls scoring 20 points higher on average than boys in the eighth grade and 14 points higher in 12th grade. Those who qualified for free and reduced price lunch, a key indicator of poverty, also had lower scores than those who did not; there was a 27 point difference between the two at the eighth grade.

For the 2011 exam, laptops were brought into public and private schools across the country and more than 50,000 students were tested to get a nationally representative sample. Students were given prompts that required them to write essays that explained, persuaded, or conveyed an experience.

Kathleen Blake Yancey, a professor at Florida State University who served on the advisory panel for the test, said one factor is that research show most students in the United States don't compose at the keyboard.

"What they do is sort of type already written documents into the machine, much as we used to do with typewriters four decades ago," she said.

Yancey said for this reason there was some concern about having students write on the computer as opposed to by hand.

Likewise, having the advantage of spell-check assumes student know how to use it. And in some schools and neighborhoods, computers are still not easily accessible.

"There are not so many students that actually learn to write composing at the keyboard," she said.

Yancey added that many students who do have access to computers are not necessarily using them to write at school, but to take standardized tests and filling in bubbles.

"Digital technology is a technology," she said. "Paper and pencil is a technology. If technology were the answer, that would be pretty simple."

Concordia to cut tuition, fees by $10K

Concordia University is pairing two words that don't often come in contact -- "tuition" and "cut."

The St. Paul school will announce Wednesday that it is lowering its undergraduate tuition and fees by $10,000, or 33.7 percent, to $19,700 for the next school year. It will become the first college in Minnesota to slash its sticker price. But it joins a few others across the country who have responded to growing concern about the rising price of college with a similar dramatic move.

Just a handful of Concordia undergrads now pay the full $29,700 in tuition and fees. But Concordia hopes to attract families who are being scared off by the published price.

Strike highlights split over poverty's role in learning

(Reuters) - The Chicago teachers strike, which appeared headed toward a resolution Friday, has underscored a fundamental split over the biggest issue confronting America's public schools: how to provide a decent education to children mired in poverty.

Across the U.S., poverty is irrefutably linked to poor academic performance. On last year's national reading exam, nine-year-olds from low-income families scored nearly three full grade levels below their wealthier peers. The gap was nearly as large in math.

Why These Kids Get a Free Ride to College

According to census data, 39 percent of Kalamazoo's students are white, and 44 percent are African-American. One of every three students in the Kalamazoo district falls below the national poverty level. One in 12 is homeless. Many of them are the first in their families to finish high school; many come from single-parent homes. Some are young parents themselves: Kalamazoo has one of the highest pregnancy rates among black teenagers in the state.

And yet, for the vast majority of the 500-plus students who graduate each year in Kalamazoo, a better future really does await after they collect their diplomas. The high-school degrees come with the biggest present most of them will ever receive: free college.

Back in November 2005, when this year's graduates were in sixth grade, the superintendent of Kalamazoo's public schools, Janice M. Brown, shocked the community by announcing that unnamed donors were pledging to pay the tuition at Michigan's public colleges, universities and community colleges for every student who graduated from the district's high schools. All of a sudden, students who had little hope of higher education saw college in their future. Called the Kalamazoo Promise, the program -- blind to family income levels, to pupils' grades and even to disciplinary and criminal records -- would be the most inclusive, most generous scholarship program in America.

It would also mark the start of an important social experiment. From the very beginning, Brown, the only person in town who communicates directly with the Promise donors, has suggested that the program is supposed to do more than just pay college bills. It's primarily meant to boost Kalamazoo's economy. The few restrictions -- among them, children must reside in the Kalamazoo public-school district and graduate from one of its high schools -- seem designed to encourage families to stay and work in the region for a long time. The program tests how place-based development might work when education is the first investment.

Wisconsin K-12 Spending 18th in the USA, 4th Largest School State Tax Dollar Redistributions

he Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reviewed budget documents from 48 states that "publish education data in a way that allows historic comparisons," with Indiana and Hawaii being excluded from the review because they don't do so. Overall, 35 states still are funding K-12 education below pre-recession levels, according to the paper.

"There is no doubt Wisconsin has deprioritized K-12 spending," says Sen. John Lehman, D-Racine, who chairs the state Senate's Committee on Education and Corrections. "Education took the biggest cuts in the history of the state" over the 2011-13 biennium.

"The cuts counteract and sometimes undermine education reform and more generally hinder the ability of school districts to deliver high-quality education, with long-term negative consequences for the nation's economic competitiveness," the report states.

Some, however, say there are significant problems with the review by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Todd Berry, the president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, notes that while the report purports to show changes in per-pupil spending in each state, what it's really showing is the amount of state aid appropriated per student. He says such numbers are "particularly useless in Wisconsin given the significant role that local property taxes" play in per-pupil funding here.

Open(ish)-source lexicography

HAVE you heard the "amazeballs" news about Collins Online English Dictionary? It's become the "frenemy" of tradition-lovers after its recent additions of words crowdsourced from the public, which some might consider the equivalent of "mummy porn" slipping in to Shakespeare. Indeed, don't be surprised if you spot a "bashtag" about this latest development, or someone demanding a "tweetup" to resolve the issue.

As dubious as this may sound to some, the above paragraph was legitimate English. Indeed, its veracity has passed the test of those sternest of eyes, the lexicographers at CollinsDictionary.com. These sticklers for spelling and high standards this week approved 86 new words that came in the form of online public submissions.

Of course every new dictionary has new words that upset traditionalists, and crowdsourcing is nothing new. John Simpson, the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, says that in 1859 the OED appealed to readers in America "to supply material for us" and that the dictionary is an "amalgamation of editorial effort, users contribution, and academic consultants who review what we put out before we publish it".

Reading, Writing, and Rabble-Rousing Does unionization make for better teachers?

The Chicago teacher strike seemed to be heading toward resolution on Thursday, although school probably won't be back in session until next week. Among the teachers' complaints was Mayor Rahm Emanuel's plan to base evaluations largely on student test scores and to expand charter schools that hire non-union teachers. Are unionized teachers better than non-unionized teachers?

It's not clear. Despite decades of trying, no one has come up with a perfect study design to measure the effects of unionization on teacher performance. One strategy favored by economists is to ask what happens to student outcomes when the teachers in a school district unionize. These studies don't reflect well on unions. An oft-cited 1996 study found that the high school dropout rate in a school district increases 2.3 percentage points after its teachers unionize. The study also suggested that unionization tends to soak up a district's financial resources: When non-union districts increase salaries and reduce class size, the dropout rate decreases. In unionized districts, however, the dropout rate is virtually impervious to increased spending. Another studied, published in 2009, was slightly kinder to unions, finding that teacher unionization had no significant impact on the dropout rate.

Madison school taxpayers on the hook for stays at four-star hotels

In total, district employees racked up $44,723 worth of hotel bills and $10,036 worth of restaurant bills in last year, according to EAGnews, which reviewed district credit card statements and check registers.

On the spending list:

$15,474.22 charged at Hyatt Hotels in Chicago on July 13, 2011.

$3,133.55 at the Sheraton NY Hotel and Towers on Jan. 6, 2011.

$4,736 in charges at Hotel 71 in downtown Chicago on Dec. 19, 2011

Two transactions -each worth $288.96 - were made at the Rio Suites in Las Vegas on April 27, 2011.

$223.57 in charges at the Heidel House Resort and Spa on June 23. There was another charge of $756.64 at the same resort six days later.

The spending occurred as Madison Metro and its teachers stressed over apparent deep cuts in state aid and the implementation of Act 10, the law, led by Gov. Scott Walker, that gutted collective bargaining for most public employees.

James Howard, president of the Madison Metropolitan School Board, told Wisconsin Reporter the nearly $55,000 in credit card charges for hotels and restaurants represent a fraction of the district's approximately $376 million budget. The board, Howard said, thought the expenditures were "reasonable."

"The real question is for us, do we have procedures in place, checks and balances to make sure we don't have unreasonable expenses in this area?" he said, noting the board is considering that question as the result of EAG's investigation.

Why Do Colleges Compete by Becoming More Expensive?

It is ceaselessly (and correctly) observed that college tuition has gone through the roof and something must be done to get the cost of higher education under control. In the 10 years between 2000 and 2009, while the median income of American families grew a modest 16 percent, the cost of attending college shot up 63 percent; more than 70 percent for in-state students at public universities. Even during the terrible year 2009, when family income actually fell more than 2 percent, average tuitions rose nearly 4 percent at all institutions; more than 4 percent at public universities. Today, the list price for a student from an average American family to attend a prestige college or university for 7 1/2 months is only slightly less than her family's entire income in 12 months.

Free marketers champion for-profit universities as the answer. If they are, it is an odd answer: 80 to 90 percent of the for-profits' income comes from federal tax dollars--$26.5 billion in 2009. Another odd "solution" presently in play is to radically cut state aid for state universities which, of course, forces the universities to increase tuition even faster (and to try to replace in-state students with out-of-staters, for whom tuition is typically two to three times higher).

Internship Tips

Getting an internship can be easier than finding a full-time job, but not always. This mostly depends on in which industry you are looking to work. For example, Wall Street internships typically go to students in "core" schools targeted by that company (read: Ivy League or equivalent) or with close relationships to the management. For startups, your school is less important than your persistence, interest, and ability.

In Chicago, Rahm Emanuel is in a showdown against teachers

Rahm Emanuel is not big on ambiguity. He was thrilled, a few days before he took office last year, when the Illinois House voted 112 to 1 for a school improvement package that, among other things, made it harder for teachers unions to call strikes.

A "historic day of opportunity for kids in the city of Chicago," he said after the vote. Rank-and-file teachers were less pleased, particularly when an Emanuel ally boasted, "The unions cannot strike in Chicago."

Teachers are now on strike in Chicago-- loudly and enthusiastically -- and Emanuel (D) finds himself in a far more pointed and public battle than he had bargained for. Under a national spotlight, his famous dealmaking skills are being severely tested by an increasingly familiar set of schoolhouse issues seen in communities across the country as contentious and often personal.

Math anxiety causes trouble for students as early as first grade

Many high-achieving students experience math anxiety at a young age -- a problem that can follow them throughout their lives, new research at the University of Chicago shows.
In a study of first- and second-graders, Sian Beilock, professor in psychology, found that students report worry and fear about doing math as early as first grade. Most surprisingly math anxiety harmed the highest-achieving students, who typically have the most working memory, Beilock and her colleagues found.

Who Killed the Liberal Arts?

In a loose definition, the "liberal arts" denote college study anchored in preponderantly Western literature, philosophy, and history, with science, mathematics, and foreign languages playing a substantial, though less central, role; in more recent times, the social science subjects--psychology, sociology, political science--have also sometimes been included. The liberal arts have always been distinguished from more specialized, usually vocational training. For the ancient Greeks, the liberal arts were the subjects thought necessary for a free man to study. If he is to remain free, in this view, he must acquire knowledge of the best thought of the past, which will cultivate in him the intellectual depth and critical spirit required to live in an informed and reasonable way in the present.

MIT beats Cambridge and Harvard to top spot in world university rankings

Cambridge has lost its place as the number one ranking university in the world, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the US university that specialises in science and technology, taking over the top slot.

MIT came first, while Cambridge, which topped the list in 2011, came second and Harvard third in the QS World University Rankings, published on Tuesday.

The QS table is based on measures of research quality, graduate employability, teaching and how international the faculties and student bodies are.

University College London, Oxford, Imperial College, Yale, the University of Chicago, Princeton and Caltech, in that order, make up the top 10.

Students Over Unions

The most important civil rights battleground today is education, and, likewise, the most crucial struggle against poverty is the one fought in schools.

America's education system has become less a ladder of opportunity than a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next.

That's why school reform is so critical. This is an issue of equality, opportunity and national conscience. It's not just about education, but about poverty and justice -- and while the Chicago teachers' union claims to be striking on behalf of students, I don't see it.

Is College a Lousy Investment?

And why are we so unhappy about it? We all seem to agree that a college education is wonderful, and yet strangely we worry when we see families investing so much in this supposedly essential good. Maybe it's time to ask a question that seems almost sacrilegious: is all this investment in college education really worth it?

The answer, I fear, is that it's not. For an increasing number of kids, the extra time and money spent pursuing a college diploma will leave them worse off than they were before they set foot on campus.

Role of testing at issue in Chicago teachers' strike

The teachers' strike that went through its second day Tuesday highlights tensions between public schools and the federal government, unions and administrators, and teachers and their bosses.

It's a trend that began under President George W. Bush with No Child Left Behind, which required states to test students to qualify for federal funds, and continues with President Obama's Race to the Top, a federal grant competition that pushes schools to use standardized test scores to retain and reward teachers.

"We are at a critical moment," says Kevin Kumashiro, a University of Illinois at Chicago education professor. At stake, he says: Whether unions can resist a nationwide shift toward the use of test scores to evaluate teachers, the spread of charter schools that hire non-union teachers and the erosion of teachers' job security.

Why Men Fail

You're probably aware of the basic trends. The financial rewards to education have increased over the past few decades, but men failed to get the memo.

In elementary and high school, male academic performance is lagging. Boys earn three-quarters of the D's and F's. By college, men are clearly behind. Only 40 percent of bachelor's degrees go to men, along with 40 percent of master's degrees.

Thanks to their lower skills, men are dropping out of the labor force. In 1954, 96 percent of the American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. Today, that number is down to 80 percent. In Friday's jobs report, male labor force participation reached an all-time low.

September 13, 2012

College Is No Place for Remedial Education

More than 2 million U.S. college students this fall will be spending a good bit of their time reviewing what they were supposed to learn in high school or even earlier. They are taking "remedial" education courses.

A recent study issued by ACT Inc., a testing organization measuring "college readiness," found that less than one-third of graduating high-school seniors met benchmark standards for science, and a majority failed to meet them for math. Even in English and reading, a large minority of students were below a level that would mostly earn a grade of C or better in college- level work.

The results are depressing. In science, most students don't come close (within three points) of meeting the ACT benchmark standards. Yes, it is often pointed out, some population groups are less prepared than others: Only 5 percent of black students meet all four ACT criteria. But for white students, for every high-school graduate who meets the benchmarks, there are two who don't. The student at least partially unprepared for college is the rule, not the exception.

Ontario teachers' boycott of after-school programs creates confusion

So, will there be early-morning cross-country practice Thursday or not?

Students and parents are holding their breath to see which of Ontario's 76,000 elementary teachers will decide not to run after-school activities to protest the new law that freezes their wages.

While the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario has asked members to take a "pause" in extracurricular activities, it stopped short of ordering them to do so or telling them how long the boycott should last.

So no one -- not parents, not school boards, not even some local teacher unions -- seems to know quite what will happen.

All Wisconsin high school juniors would take ACT in 2014-15 under Evers proposal

"There's a general recognition that our current testing regime is not getting the job done and that we always knew we were going to have to do something different," he said. "When people understand the importance of measuring growth over time instead of raw test scores and getting testing information back to teachers in a more timely manner, I think they will look more favorably on spending money on new tests."

Still, Kestell said $7 million was a lot, and probably would not have been considered at all two years ago when the state made significant cuts to education spending.

For the next budget cycle, he said: "It could very well happen, but it's way too early to predict anything positive."

The DPI's Johnson pointed to Milwaukee Public Schools as a model district that has begun ACT testing for all juniors, setting aside time for them to take the four-hour exam in school. Though testing all juniors has lowered the district's average ACT composite score, the move has received praise for opening opportunities to more students who may not have known they were ready for college, and for providing a broader measure of student performance.

Wisconsin would pay for all public high school juniors to take the ACT college admissions test starting in two years as part of a $7 million budget initiative State Superintendent Tony Evers announced Wednesday.

The proposal also includes administering three other tests offered by ACT to measure college and career readiness in high school. The tests would replace the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination, which is currently administered to 10th-graders to comply with federal testing requirements.

"We need to give our students and their families better resources to plan for study and work after high school," Evers said. "It makes sense to use the ACT to fulfill state and federal testing requirements at the high school level with an exam package that provides so much more than the WKCE: college and career readiness assessments and a college admissions test score."

Under the proposal, all public school ninth-graders would take the ACT EXPLORE assessment in spring of the 2014-15 school year. All 10th-graders would take the ACT PLAN test, and all 11th-graders would take the ACT and the WorkKeys tests.

The state would pay for students to take each test once. Those who want to take an ACT a second time to improve their score would have to pay for it themselves.

Also, by training all schools to administer the ACT, the proposal would help students in rural districts who lack access to certified ACT testing sites, Evers said.

How Public Unions Became So Powerful

The Chicago teachers strike has put Democrats in a difficult position. Teacher unions are the most powerful constituency in the Democratic Party, but their interests are ever more clearly at odds with taxpayers and inner-city families. Chicago is reviving scenes from the last crisis of liberalism in the 1970s, when municipal unions drove many American cities to disorder and bankruptcy. Where did their power come from?

Before the 1950s, government-employee unions were almost inconceivable. When the Boston police unionized and went on strike in 1919, the ensuing chaos--rioting and looting--crippled the public-union idea. Massachusetts Gov. Calvin Coolidge became a national hero by breaking the strike, issuing the dictum: "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time." President Woodrow Wilson called the strike "an intolerable crime against civilization."

President Franklin D. Roosevelt also rejected government unionism. He told the head of the Federation of Federal Employees in 1937 that collective bargaining "cannot be transplanted into the public service. The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer" because "the employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws."

Louisiana's top education official sketches plans for closer scrutiny of private schools

The state's top education official, Superintendent John White, laid out a broad framework Tuesday for revising the way Louisiana vets state-sanctioned private schools, a process under greater scrutiny now that those schools can apply to receive tax dollars through the state's new voucher program. Without going into detail -- the superintendent plans to bring a fleshed-out plan before the state board of education next month -- White told members of the board's nonpublic school council that his approach will vary from school to school based on the number of children affected and the amount of tax dollars at stake.

Rising to the Challenge of College and Career Readiness

Nearly every state has adopted the goal of college and career readiness for all students. At the end of 2011, 45 states had adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics,1 with the stated goal to prepare students to "graduate high school able to succeed in entry-level, credit- bearing academic college courses and in workforce training programs" (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010a).2 Other states, such as Texas and Virginia, have also focused on aligning their content and performance standards with college and career readiness requirements (Virginia Department of Education, 2010; Texas Education Agency & Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, 2009).

Not surprisingly, current research shows that many students are not on target to meet college and career readiness requirements. For example, if performance standards for the Common Core State Standards are set at a level comparable to ACT's College Readiness Benchmarks--consistent with the goal of preparing students for college and careers--the majority of today's students are not well prepared to meet those standards (ACT, 2010).

High school football participation

A couple of weeks ago, at a high school football game near where I live, a team showed up and played with just 13 players in uniform. Predictably, the game ended 53-0, and it was a struggle for the winning team to keep from scoring 100. At one point, a kid running a punt back for a touchdown intentionally fell at the 20 because enough was enough.

On the same night, at Galt High School near Sacramento, the school's administration decided to forfeit a game rather than play with 14 healthy bodies. This was a big enough story to make the 11 o'clock news; Galt High has been playing football for 89 years, many of them with distinction, and this was the first time it had been forced to forfeit.

September 12, 2012

Do Top Teachers Produce "A Year And A Half Of Learning?"

One claim that gets tossed around a lot in education circles is that "the most effective teachers produce a year and a half of learning per year, while the least effective produce a half of a year of learning."

This talking point is used all the time in advocacy materials and news articles. Its implications are pretty clear: Effective teachers can make all the difference, while ineffective teachers can do permanent damage.

As with most prepackaged talking points circulated in education debates, the "year and a half of learning" argument, when used without qualification, is both somewhat valid and somewhat misleading. So, seeing as it comes up so often, let's very quickly identify its origins and what it means.

This particular finding is traceable to a 1992 paper by economist Eric Hanushek, one which focused primarily on the relationship between achievement and family composition in Gary, Indiana (the data are from the early- to mid-1970s, and include only low-income students). After reviewing his (very interesting) main results on the relationship between student achievement and family size, birth order and the interval between births, Hanushek presents an analysis of test-based teacher effects.

Chicago Seven: 7 Early Takaways From The Chicago Teachers Strike

As the strike in Chicago enters its second day there is a lot of uncertainty but here are some early takeaways events in Chicago should probably remind us of:

Seriously, it's not all about the kids. Saying it's 'all about the kids' is education's version of a routinized benediction. You hear it all the time - and often just preceding or just after some decision that's actually not that good for kids. The system is more or less still set up for the benefit of adults - and that's not just teachers unions, it's management, vendors, and so forth, too. In this case, if the kids really mattered most then almost 400K of them wouldn't be without places to go today because the adults charged with teaching them decided to strike.

This is a clash of values. This Ed Trust statement calls out the teachers union for low-balling expectations for kids. It's a good illustration of how underneath the posturing and rhetoric and the substantive disagreements Chicago is really about what kind of school system they city is going to have - the old kind, which was a quasi-jobs program or the new type where performance and execution matter most. In that way the strike is an important national moment.

"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).

Athens Teacher unions complain of staff shortages

In a statement to reporters, Arvanitopoulos noted that the school year was launched with all schools fully equipped with books and staff, with books arriving even in remote Gavdos.

"Primary and kindergarten teachers and teachers of all basic subjects in secondary education were at their posts today. During the next week, when the size of each class is finalised, we will appoint every necessary reserve teacher, down to the last," he said. Arvanitopoulos noted that even in a time of dire economic crisis, the ministry proved able to ensure that schools were open, supplied with books and that teachers were in their place.

How much do Chicago teachers make?

Luckily, we don't have to guess, since CPS publishes median salary statistics (see page 198 in this pdf). As is often the case with stats like these, the median salary is below the mean: for the 2010-11 school year, the most recent year for which data is available, the median salary was $67,974, as opposed to the mean of $74,236 that year (as reported, pdf, by the Illinois State Board of Education). That mean is slightly different than the one reported by CPS because it relies on more recent ISBE data.

Some of that salary has to go to pension contributions. Teachers are required to contribute 9 percent of their salary to their pensions, and support personnel must contribute 8.5 percent, as opposed to 6.2 percent if they were part of the Social Security system. But the Chicago Public Schools system pays for 7 percent of the employee contribution. So the more relevant comparison is a 1.5 to 2 percent contribution for CPS employees compared to 6.2 percent for private sector workers paying Social Security tax. So the median after-pension income is $66,614, which a private sector employee on Social Security would need to earn $71,017 a year to make. So a median of $71,017 (or a mean of $77,560) is the most relevant number for comparing Chicago public school teachers to other workers.

What about the longer school day that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is implementing? The school day is increasing from five hours and forty-five minutes for elementary school and seven hours for high school, to seven and seven and a half hours, respectively. Isn't an increase in hours of that scale effectively a wage cut, in per-hour terms?

Everything you need to know about the Chicago teachers' strike, in one post

Chicago performs quite poorly on national assessments of educational quality. As Reuters notes, fourth-graders in Chicago performed an average of nine points worse than the big city average and sixteen points worse than the national average on the math section of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the national gold standard for measuring learning. On reading, they were eight and seventeen points worse than big city and national averages, respectively. That's a bit better than Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. but worse than New York.

Chicago also has shorter than average school years and school days. Many students are only in class for 170 days a year as of a few years ago, below the state minimum of 176 days and the national average of 180 days; under Emanuel, the year was lengthened to 180 days. The school day in Chicago averages five hours and forty five minutes in elementary schools (as opposed to the national average of six hours and forty-two minutes) and seven hours for secondary schools, above the national average of 6.6 hours. Emanuel and teachers recently negotiated a deal to hire 500 new teachers to allow for a 90 minute school day extension without increasing hours for current teachers.

Advocating Public Teacher Contract Negotiations

Spoiler alert: when Maggie Gyllenhaal's new feature film, Won't Back Down, hits theaters later this month, its plot hinges on the forcing of school officials to make big decisions in front of parents rather than behind closed doors. The film is fictional, but raging against backroom power politics is not. Teachers' unions and district officials almost always negotiate privately, so when those negotiations reach a deal or an impasse -- or lead to a strike, as they did in Chicago yesterday -- the public gets to hear only part of the story as families scramble to figure out what to do with their kids. Chicago, whose 400,000 students make it the U.S.'s third largest school district, today offered safe havens for kids in dozens of public libraries and churches and, for a four-hour stretch this morning, in nearly 150 public schools staffed with nonunion workers.

September 11, 2012

Webinar: Accountability and Choice

An important part of supporting choice is providing families with good information about school performance. However, families often do not have access to school performance information when deciding on schools. The Florida Department of Education implemented an A-F School Grading System that works to provide transparent, objective, and easily understood data to parents, educators, and the public to spur improvement among all schools. State and district leaders will spark a frank conversation about whether and how to use a state accountability system in districts' school choice processes and will ask participants for feedback on how to expand the use of school performance information.

Hortonville: The Strike That Changed Wisconsin

When 25,000 Chicago teachers walked off the job on Monday, it provided a perfect bookend to the sturm und drang Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker faced in his recent attempts to lessen teachers union power.

But while the Chicago imbroglio marks the end of the Wisconsin struggle, many have forgotten that Wisconsin played a central role in birthing the framework that emboldens teachers unions.

In 1974, tiny Hortonville, Wis., saw one of the longest and ugliest work stoppages in American education history.

Before it was over, the town would be flooded with thousands of union activists and would draw the attention of the nationwide media. In fact, the Hortonville strike would prompt many of the changes Walker only recently revoked.

In March 1974, teachers unions were still a relatively new phenomenon. Wisconsin was one of 11 states in the late 1960s and early '70s where statewide teachers unions were formed. (The Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association became the first certified teachers bargaining agent in Wisconsin in 1964.) Between 1969 and 1974, Wisconsin teachers struck 50 times.

But the state hadn't seen anything like what happened in Hortonville on March 18, 1974, when 88 teachers walked off the job. The teachers were seeking pay increases of 16.5% in the 1974-'75 school year; the district offered 1.2%. After several days of picketing, the district fired 86 of the striking teachers and immediately brought in replacements to get the schools running again.

How teacher strikes hurt student achievement

Talks between the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union broke down yesterday, and now the city's teachers are on strike, just as class was about to start for the 2012-13 school year. Labor will insist that the strikes lead to contracts that attract good teachers who promote student learning in the long-run, while Emanuel notes that the teachers are striking over his proposed evaluation system, which he argues will help achievement going forward. Leaving that debate aside, what does the strike itself mean for students?

Achievement Gap Plan - Accountability Plans and Progress Indicators

The following motions were passed by the Board of Education on June 18, 2012, to assure that all staff responsible for the program or position/s follow the following protocol for accountability. Each staff member must submit to the Deputy Superintendent their plans for accountability in sections 1, 2 and 3 by September 1, 2012 (See attached template).

New Jersey Interdistrict Choice: Overcoming the Trap of Geography

Interdistrict school choice is one of the best new education programs legislators and Gov. Chris Christie have signed off on in recent years. Certainly, its scale is small -- statewide there are only about 3,300 "choice" students who've moved to another district this year. Next year, that number is expected to jump to about 6,100. Still, that's a drop in the bucket. Many of the schools accepting "choice" students only take a small number like 10 or 20 total.

Understanding School Discipline in California: Perceptions and Practice

As concerns grow about the effects of discipline policies on schools and students, and especially their disproportionate impact on African American and Latino students, attempts to reform these policies have also gained momentum.

To better understand how discipline policies are being implemented in California schools, EdSource conducted a survey of 315 of the state's largest school districts. Collectively these districts enroll two-thirds of California's students. This new EdSource report describes the findings from that survey and presents the perspectives of the district administrators in charge of student discipline policies for their schools.

Key findings include:

School officials express a need for support to more effectively manage discipline issues, including additional school counselors and community resources.

More than 80% said the state's budget crisis has affected their ability to deal with student behavior and discipline.

School districts are trying a range of alternative approaches to suspension and expulsions.

Two-thirds of officials express concern about the differential impact of discipline policies on students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

The survey found that an overwhelming 81 percent of administrators ranked student discipline and behavior management as a concern when compared to other issues facing districts, although just 22 percent said it was a major concern. They worry about the disproportionate number of expulsions and suspensions of Latino and African American students, about not having discretion when it comes to the state's zero tolerance policies, and about the financial burden of student discipline on the schools in staff time, legal fees, and security measures.

"They are keenly aware of the challenges they face and are actively searching for solutions and support," said Louis Freedberg, executive director of EdSource.

Debt Collectors Cashing In on Student Loan Roundup

At a protest last year at New York University, students called attention to their mounting debt by wearing T-shirts with the amount they owed scribbled across the front -- $90,000, $75,000, $20,000.

On the sidelines was a business consultant for the debt collection industry with a different take.

"I couldn't believe the accumulated wealth they represent -- for our industry," the consultant, Jerry Ashton, wrote in a column for a trade publication, InsideARM.com. "It was lip-smacking."

Though Mr. Ashton says his column was meant to be ironic, it nonetheless highlighted undeniable truths: many borrowers are struggling to pay off their student loans, and the debt collection industry is cashing in.

As the number of people taking out government-backed student loans has exploded, so has the number who have fallen at least 12 months behind in making payments -- about 5.9 million people nationwide, up about a third in the last five years.

15-year-old Joshua Wong Chi-fung, co-founder of the group Scholarism, has come to symbolise the anti-national education movement's energy.

You know Joshua Wong Chi-fung is a busy young man the moment he meets you. With the government headquarters in Admiralty alive with protest action, he walks fast, talks almost too quickly to catch his words, and hardly has time to chat at all.

The driven 15-year-old can claim credit for an anti-national-education message that is now all over the city. From a YouTube video showing his eloquent engagement with reporters, to mass rallies organised by a group he co-founded, he has grown in stature beyond his years, becoming an icon in the snowballing movement against the classes.

A message to high school students who hate high school; Here is why you hate it

The hate mail that followed (written mostly by math teachers) was unbelievable. Mostly accusing me of being irrational and incapable of thought, and stating that math teaches people to think. This is pretty funny because if math is supposed to teach one to think, as they argue, they might have looked me up and discovered that not only was I a math major in college, but I was also a professor of computer science.

Of course, it is not only high school math I am against. I believe that every single subject taught in high school is a mistake. What I write here will infuriate teachers, but teachers are not my enemy. It isn't their fault. They are cogs in a system over which they have no control. I believe there are many great teachers, and I believe that teaching and teachers are very important.

LSAT Scores at Top Schools Are Dropping Like Flies

If you think you're a pretty smart cookie--but not spectacularly so--this might be the year that you can squeeze into a better law school than you thought possible.

The reason is simple: There are fewer applicants, which results in more opportunities at more prestigious law schools. You've probably heard about that 25 percent drop in law school applications in the past three years or so, but did you know that the top 14 law schools will be forced to accept students who are below the top 2 percent of their LSATs? (Sobs, please.)

Here's the nitty gritty from Blueprint, an LSAT tutoring company, based on statistics from the Law School Admissions Council, Inc.:

We see that in 2010/2011, there were 3,430 students in the top 2 percent on the LSAT (171+), which is at or near the median LSAT score for most elite (top 14 or T14 as determined by U.S. News & World Report rankings) law schools. That number drops to 2,600 in 2011/2012, resulting in nearly 1,000 fewer top percentile scores from which law schools can recruit.

Commentary on Student Tenure and Achievement in Madison

Given that, we should be cautious not to overreact to recent data the school district provided at the request of Mayor Paul Soglin. Yet the data is intriguing. And the numbers highlight the academic peril that often follows a transient student.

For example, in tracking the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination scores of eighth-graders, we learn that those students who took the math portion of the test in Madison as both a fourth-grader and an eighth-grader scored significantly higher than those who took the test here only in eighth grade.

For the longer-term students who took the test last school year, 78 percent scored proficient or advanced in math while, for the shorter-term students, 65 percent were proficient or higher. The story is much the same in reading scores. Of long-term students in the district, 81 percent scored proficient or higher as an eighth-grader while, for the more recently arrived students, just 65 percent hit that mark.

Where first school kids go to college

Sidwell Friends is a special school, an exemplar of the best education we can provide in America for $34,268 a year. It is simlar to many other selective private schools, except that the children of the president of the United States attend. You might call it the First School or High School One.

I was drawn to a page of the most recent Sidwell alumni magazine enumerating where the class of 2012 went to college. Some people have the impression that kids at schools like Sidwell all go to the Ivy League, but that's not true. One of the most popular colleges among Sidwell's 123 graduates this year was a state school, the University of Michigan, number 28 on the U.S. News list.. More Sidwell students (15) were admitted there than any other college sought by the senior class, and more (6) chose it than any other college.

September 10, 2012

Madison School Board & Employee Handbook

Not only did Governor Walker's Act 10 strip from the Madison Metropolitan School District the ability to engage in collective bargaining regarding wages, benefits and working conditions, but it gave full authority to the Board to unilaterally create a "replacement document", the Employee Handbook.

At last week's Board of Education meeting, MTI Executive Director John Matthews delivered a letter to the Board in which, after acknowledging the negative impact of Act 10, he told the Board that Act 10 DID NOT take away the Board's ability to engage in conversation with representatives of MTI about the subjects to which the parties had previously agreed in bargaining, as well as any other topics. Board President James Howard called Matthews to tell him that the Board's process is still being developed and offered to meet with Matthews after the Board next meets about the Handbook.

MTI has developed a process for Handbook development for which MTI has asked to present that to the Board of Education. MTI's proposed process includes a recommendation that those elected by the members of MTI's various bargaining units be appointed to the BOE's Handbook Committee. This will assure both elected representation and input from all employee groups.
Matthews told Board of Education members about the discussions he and representatives of the AFSCME, Firefighters and Police Unions have been having with Mayor Soglin, County Executive Parisi and Supt. Nerad about the need to maintain positive employment relations, particularly relative to the development of the Handbook. Unfortunately, this effort at creating goodwill hit a bump in the road by former Supt. Nerad's failure to inform Interim Supt. Belmore. Working together to solve issues is the Madison way.

In August, over 90% of the members of the Chicago Teachers' Union voted for authorization to strike. Our CTU brothers and sisters have long been fighting against the charter school initiatives supported by Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel and a Democratic city council. On August 22, several MTI members attended a "Solidarity with CTU" night at SCFL. MTI members made up almost half the room. CTU member Becca Kelly spoke passionately about the injustice, inequity and blatant racism present in Chicago Public School policies and closures. In an interview, Chicago Teachers' Union President Karen Lewis stated, "Our students deserve smaller class sizes, a robust, well-rounded curriculum, and in-school services that address their social, emotional, intellectual and health needs. They deserve culturally-sensitive non-biased and equitable education, especially students with IEPs, emergent bilingual students and early childhood children. And all of our students deserve professional teachers who are treated as such, fully resourced school buildings and a school system that partners with parents." This is what the CTU is fighting for.

This past year CTU fought side by side with parents to halt 17 schools closings or "turn arounds" in the city. The parents did secure a meeting with the city council, but all 17 schools were closed. Next year, Kelly shared, there are over 70 Chicago Public Schools identified for "turn around or closing."

On August 22, the MTI Board voted unanimously to support the resolutions put forth by the CTU. The MTI Board also recommended further fundraising efforts. MTI President Kerry Motoviloff spoke in support of the CTU that evening. She called for MTI members to stand with our CTU brothers and sisters as they stood with us when we called them. Speaking of the anti-worker movement, she said, "This is not a Madison issue. This is not a Chicago issue. This is not a Wisconsin issue. This is not even limited to a union issue. This is a worker issue." She continued, "Scott Walker, Rahm Emanuel, they cannot define us. They can make things difficult. They can give us hoops to jump thorough. They can try to throw us off our focus to play defense. But the more we control our message, our voice, the more potent our acts become. This is all one fight. We are all one movement. We will win this." The Chicago Teachers Union has published a booklet and a page of 10 talking points, both can be downloaded in PDF on the CTU website. Members are encouraged to visit it for more details. MTI will keep members abreast of future solidarity actions.

The Chicago battle has pitted Karen Lewis, one of the country's most vocal labor leaders, against Mr. Emanuel, one of its most prominent mayors and the former White House chief of staff for President Barack Obama. The Democratic mayor has made efforts to overhaul the city's public education a centerpiece of his administration.

The two sides have been negotiating for months over issues including wages, health-care benefits and job security. The city has offered teachers a 3% pay raise the first year and 2% annual raises for the next three years. The average teacher salary in Chicago is about $70,000.

On Sunday night, city officials and union leaders said the wage issues aren't the sticking point. Rather, the two sides are at loggerheads over a new teacher-evaluation system and how much of it should be weighted on student test scores, and over job security for teachers laid off from low-performing schools.

Best reformers create optimism, energy as they push strong change

I probably shouldn't do this, but I keep thinking about Heidi Ramirez when I should be focusing on Darienne Driver.

Ramirez is gone now after two years as chief academic officer of Milwaukee Public Schools. Driver is freshly arrived as MPS' chief innovation officer (a new position). The two jobs aren't exactly the same, but there is reason to juxtapose Ramirez and Driver.

Specifically, when school opened in 2010, Ramirez was a youngish, very smart, change-minded, powerful MPS leader, fresh in from Philadelphia with degrees from Harvard and Stanford. And when school opened in 2012, Driver was a youngish, very smart, change-minded, powerful MPS leader, fresh in from Philadelphia with a lot of work done on a Harvard PhD.

More important, there are lessons from Ramirez's time in Milwaukee that help frame the challenges Driver faces.

Who sends most competitors to the Paralympics?

:

THE biggest national team at the Paralympic games in London is from the host country, Great Britain. The British team is 295-strong, larger even than that of the world's most populous country, China. China topped the medal table at the games it hosted in Beijing four years ago, with Britain second, and these two countries were in the same position halfway through the London games. (America, which came third in Beijing, is trailing in sixth place at present.) Ranking the number of competitors on a population-weighted basis inevitably flatters tiny nations (Ireland is the biggest country in the top ten), but it does provide an interesting snapshot. Of the richer countries, Antipodean and Nordic nations appear to take their involvement in both the Olympics and the Paralympics pretty seriously. At the other end of the table, India and Indonesia, among the world's four most populous nations, have sent tiny teams to the Paralympics and share the lowest ranking with another ten countries. Around 40 nations, however, did not even make it into the ranking as they sent athletes to the Olympics but not to the Paralympics. Five countries have sent more competitors to the Paralympics than they did to the Olympics: Iraq, Rwanda, Iran, Thailand and Bosnia (not shown).

For success in the long run, brain power helps, but what our kids really need to learn is grit

We are living through a particularly anxious moment in the history of American parenting. In the nation's big cities these days, the competition among affluent parents over slots in favored preschools verges on the gladiatorial. A pair of economists from the University of California recently dubbed this contest for early academic achievement the "Rug Rat Race," and each year, the race seems to be starting earlier and growing more intense.

At the root of this parental anxiety is an idea you might call the cognitive hypothesis. It is the belief, rarely spoken aloud but commonly held nonetheless, that success in the U.S. today depends more than anything else on cognitive skill--the kind of intelligence that gets measured on IQ tests--and that the best way to develop those skills is to practice them as much as possible, beginning as early as possible.

There is something undeniably compelling about the cognitive hypothesis. The world it describes is so reassuringly linear, such a clear case of inputs here leading to outputs there. Fewer books in the home means less reading ability; fewer words spoken by your parents means a smaller vocabulary; more math work sheets for your 3-year-old means better math scores in elementary school. But in the past decade, and especially in the past few years, a disparate group of economists, educators, psychologists and neuroscientists has begun to produce evidence that calls into question many of the assumptions behind the cognitive hypothesis.

What matters most in a child's development, they say, is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years of life. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence. Economists refer to these as noncognitive skills, psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us often think of them as character.

Problems plaguing UW's online course management system

A technological glitch is confounding information technology experts and causing major headaches for some students and professors across the UW System as the 2012-13 academic year gets under way.

The problem lies within the university's online learning and course management system, which is provided by the company Desire2Learn and managed by UW-Madison's Division of Information Technology (DoIT).

According to this university update posted Friday at noon: "DoIT technologists continue to work daily with experts from Desire2Learn (D2L) and Microsoft to address the issue of slow application response. We're keenly aware of the problem and regret the impact on the UW educational community. We remain steadfast in our commitment to resolve this situation and provide regular progress updates on the status. Please note this situation has the attention of top leadership within DoIT and Desire2Learn."

Chicago Teachers Say Latest Offer is Disappointing

The vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union said Saturday the city school district's latest offer in contract negotiations was disappointing and that the wrangling would continue throughout the weekend, as tens of thousands of teachers readied to walk off the job on Monday.

Chicago teachers say they're prepared to walk off the job for the first time in 25 years over issues that include pay raises, classroom conditions, job security and teacher evaluations. A strike would cause massive disruptions in the nation's third-largest school district, which has 400,000 students.

The 2005 to 2011 Strategic Plan was adopted by the School Board in June 2005. It outlines major objectives for the Arlington Public Schools for the six years covered by the plan. The Strategic Plan process was designed to result in clear direction for the school system that focuses on improved student learning for all students. For each goal of the plan, the School Board has defined specific objectives, indicators, and targets or benchmarks to measure progress over each of the 6 years. This summary provides selected findings from the results presented for 2009-10.

September 9, 2012

A manifesto for the new rules on human capital

I recently spoke at the World Strategy Forum event in Seoul, where the theme was "The new rules: reframing capitalism". Predictably, the discussion focused on global financial infrastructure. But, as one of the few non-economist speakers, I instead argued that employment/unemployment is even more affected by the changing nature of work - and the wildly accelerating effectiveness of technology, which is encroaching on activities that employ tens of millions of people, especially in the developed world.

This is, I believe, in the mid to long term, both the number one problem and the number one opportunity for businesses and wider society. But the specifics of what follows were triggered by the debate at the event and were eventually encapsulated in what I grandly call: "A human capital development manifesto at the enterprise and national government level".

Adjusting for inflaton, the cost of attending a public, in-state college rose 268% from 1981 to 2011

Late summer is when parents bring their children to college. As they drive to campus they're worried about tuition increases, the burden of student debt and whether their children will find jobs when they graduate.

Some parents and high-school students are beginning to question the value of a four-year college degree in this post-Great Recession world. And you can certainly understand why they have these concerns:

College costs keep rising. The College Board reports that from 1981 to 2011, after adjusting for inflation, the average published cost of going to college is up 180% for private, nonprofit four-year colleges and 268% for in-state, public four-year colleges.

Wow. I remember my first semester at the UW- Madison 31 years ago. In state tuition was $399/semester. That is $944 in 2010, according to this calculator. Current in state UW-Madison tuition is about 5,000/semester. Crazy.

Grandparents as Source of College Funds

A study from the MetLife Mature Institute found that 29 percent of grandparents have given their grandchildren financial support for education, spending an average of $8,276 over five years. Of those grandparents who did fund their grandchildren's education, 32 percent helped with tuition or loan payments, 29 percent donated to a college savings plan, and 7 percent helped pay for graduate school.

Integrating Film into Classroom Lessons: Three Teachers

I am observing Mr. Lesser (pseudonym), a U.S. history teacher for the past four years at the school. Students sit in six rows of six movable desks facing the front of the room. Teacher settles the students down and begins a review from the text (Bower and Hart, History Alive!) of what happened in U.S. after World War I. In rapid fire fashion, the teacher asks a series of questions to the entire class:

Researchers Hack Brainwaves to Reveal PINs, Other Personal Data

Don't you dare even think about your banking account password when you slap on those fancy new brainwave headsets.

Or at least that seems to be the lesson of a new study which found that sensitive personal information, such as PIN numbers and credit card data, can be gleaned from the brainwave data of users wearing popular consumer-grade EEG headsets.

A team of security researchers from Oxford, UC Berkeley, and the University of Geneva say that they were able to deduce digits of PIN numbers, birth months, areas of residence and other personal information by presenting 30 headset-wearing subjects with images of ATM machines, debit cards, maps, people, and random numbers in a series of experiments. The paper, titled "On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks with Brain Computer Interfaces," represents the first major attempt to uncover potential security risks in the use of the headsets.

A Reverse Wisconsin: In Michigan, unions try to enshrine union power in the constitution

The proposed amendment text would make the "rights" to organize and bargain collectively a constitutional guarantee, and any state law that would "abridge, impair or limit" collective bargaining would be repealed. Last Monday, the Michigan court of appeals ruled that the measure could appear on the ballot, and the state Supreme Court heard arguments on the case Thursday.

In a filing to challenge the ballot measure, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and Attorney General Bill Schuette say the huge impact of the law can't possibly be captured in the 100 words of a ballot measure. It is misleading, Mr. Schuette wrote, for unions to "propose an innocuous-sounding constitutional amendment that has the secret effect of wholesale changes in Michigan law."

The problem is that the amendment language is so broad that the courts could interpret any union-related measure as a violation. It explicitly refers to all current and future laws. In 1997, for instance, Michigan moved new state employees to a defined-contribution pension from a defined-benefit plan. If the amendment passes, unions will challenge the new plan as unconstitutional and it could be invalidated at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Studies Find More Students Cheating, With High Achievers No Exception

Large-scale cheating has been uncovered over the last year at some of the nation's most competitive schools, like Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, the Air Force Academy and, most recently, Harvard.

Studies of student behavior and attitudes show that a majority of students violate standards of academic integrity to some degree, and that high achievers are just as likely to do it as others. Moreover, there is evidence that the problem has worsened over the last few decades.

Experts say the reasons are relatively simple: Cheating has become easier and more widely tolerated, and both schools and parents have failed to give students strong, repetitive messages about what is allowed and what is prohibited.

Admit it, first day of school exciting

Our view: Students should take advantage of the exciting opportunity in front of them.

Even those who cheered the loudest back in June when school let out probably admit to at least a smidgen of excitement as they head off for the first day of school this morning in Eau Claire and districts around Wisconsin.

Soon enough, though, the routine of the school year will settle in, leading some students to question the point of the lecture or lesson in front of them.

"I'll never use this," we can hear them say, because many of us said the same thing when we were their age.

Is Academia Becoming an "Idea Graveyard?"

Question: Science and technology don't seem to be producing the jobs or economic improvement many would hope. What often gets forgotten is that many science and technology ideas are developed in academia where they are owned by the institutions. The schools are not businesses to turn them into products and businesses have a harder time making money on ideas they don't own. So these intellectual property portfolios become idea graveyards. What if the rules changed so that the individuals who came up with the ideas could own a majority stake in their own ideas? Could they not then follow it out of academia and out to product? Seems like that would start more businesses, give universities more money (some of something as opposed to all of nothing), and even take some of the weight off of long term government support for science. Am I being naive to think that we could fix science and improve the economy?

Paul Solman:Yes, I think you are being naive. I know quite a few people at universities- professors and students both - and more and more of them talk about commercializing their research, or are actively engaged in doing so. Ideas do not seem to be trapped in the groves of academe. Just the opposite. If you think I'm wrong, readers, I trust you to let me know in the Comments section below.

A much more important hurdle to innovation may be the U.S. patent system, strengthened last week by the jury judgment against Samsung from infringing Apple patents. A number of economists have written about the anti-competitive constraints imposed by the patent system in the past decade, including Adam Jaffe of Brandeis and Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School ("Innovation and its Discontents") and two economists at Washington University, St. Louis: Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine.

Who's Afraid Of Virginia's Proficiency Targets?

The accountability provisions in Virginia's original application for "ESEA flexibility" (or "waiver") have received a great deal of criticism (see here, here, here and here). Most of this criticism focused on the Commonwealth's expectation levels, as described in "annual measurable objectives" (AMOs) - i.e., the statewide proficiency rates that its students are expected to achieve at the completion of each of the next five years, with separate targets established for subgroups such as those defined by race (black, Hispanic, Asian, white), income (subsidized lunch eligibility), limited English proficiency (LEP), and special education.

Last week, in response to the criticism, Virginia agreed to amend its application, and it's not yet clear how specifically they will calculate the new rates (only that lower-performing subgroups will be expected to make faster progress).

September 8, 2012

Confessions of a Seventh-Grade Texas History Teacher

Of all the remote corners of Texas considered difficult to reach--the Lower Canyons of the Rio Grande, in Big Bend National Park; the center-field wall at Minute Maid Park, in Houston; the butcher block at Franklin Barbecue, in Austin--the single most challenging can actually be found in every big city and rural burg in the state: the mind of a seventh grader. It's a destination with no clear path, the ground around it littered with hormonal land mines, the terrain ever shifting as growth spurts are endured or, even worse, anxiously awaited. In one of God's great dirty tricks, an awareness of peer pressure presents itself during roughly the same week as zits. Soon come a new voice, a new shape, a new smell. Nothing about it is easy, not for the seventh graders and certainly not for the teachers charged with trying to get through to them.

Seventeen of Wisconsin's 72 counties reduced property tax levies. Dane County was one of five that increased them by more than 3 percent.

Median property taxes in Dane County have increased 32.8 percent in the last 10 years. Home values have grown at a similar rate -- the median Dane County home is worth $230,800, an increase of 38.6 percent in the last decade.

Suits Challenge Classrooms That Segregate Boys, Girls

Public-school students in some parts of the country this year are going back to very different classrooms than they are used to: ones with both boys and girls.

A decade long campaign to separate genders in schools--based on the theory that children learn better that way--has sparked a backlash that is chalking up victories. Critics have sued three districts to end their single-sex classes, and sent letters of concern to 15 others.

A judge in one of those lawsuits last week ordered a school district in West Virginia to halt its single-sex program, and a handful of other districts around the country have voluntarily suspended their own split-gender classes for the new school year.

Meet a Revolutionary Educator: Thomas Jefferson

II'm surprised that with all the warfare under way about teacher tenure and performance evaluation, together with standardized testing and schools as dropout factories, there has been hardly any mention of the leading active educator among our founders, Thomas Jefferson.

Some know of him only as the creative founder of the University of Virginia, but when he was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, Jefferson introduced what he considered his most important educational effort, "A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge" in 1778.

In the invaluable The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Jefferson (Cambridge University Press, 2009), there is a chapter by Darren Staloff that I strongly recommend to present-day school boards, principals, teachers, students and members of Congress of both parties.

Disappearing Mothers

If, from beyond the grave, Betty Friedan were to review the Facebook habits of the over-30 set, I am afraid she would be very disappointed in us. By this I mean specifically the trend of women using photographs of their children instead of themselves as the main picture on their Facebook profiles. You click on a friend's name and what comes into focus is not a photograph of her face, but a sleeping blond four-year-old, or a sun-hatted toddler running on the beach. Here, harmlessly embedded in one of our favourite methods of procrastination, is a potent symbol for the new century. Where have all of these women gone? What, some earnest future historian may very well ask, do all of these babies on our Facebook pages say about "the construction of women's identity" at this particular moment in time?

IBM making smartphone version of Watson

International Business Machines researchers spent four years developing Watson, the computer smart enough to beat the champions of the quiz show "Jeopardy!" Now they're trying to figure out how to get those capabilities into the phone in your pocket.

Bernie Meyerson, IBM vice president of innovation, envisions a voice-activated Watson that answers questions, like a supercharged version of Apple's Siri personal assistant. A farmer could stand in a field and ask his phone, "When should I plant my corn?" He would get a reply in seconds, based on location data, historical trends and scientific studies.

Finding additional uses for Watson is part of IBM's plan to tap new markets and boost revenue from business analytics to $16 billion by 2015. After mastering history and pop culture for its "Jeopardy!" appearance, the system is crunching financial information for Citigroup Inc. and cancer data for WellPoint Inc. The next version, dubbed Watson 2.0, would be energy-efficient enough to work on smartphones and tablets.

Union Money in Elections

This election year, millions of Americans will donate to the political candidates and initiatives of their choice at the local, state, and federal levels. But for unionized workers, union dues come out of their paychecks and go to political causes--and they aren't consulted on where that money will go.

They broke down the unions' political spending from 2005 to 2011: $1.1 billion "supporting federal candidates through their political-action committees, which are funded with voluntary contributions, and lobbying Washington, which is a cost borne by the unions' own coffers."

Do We Still Segregate Students? Schools around the nation are 'detracking' classes, putting kids of all achievement levels in the same room. Does that sabotage higher achievers?

WHEN ERIC WITHERSPOON became superintendent of Evanston Township High School (www site) near Chicago in 2006, he walked into a math class where all the students were black. "A young man leaned over to me and said, 'This is the dummy class.'"

The kids at Evanston who took honors classes were primarily white; those in the less demanding classes were minority--a pattern repeated, still, almost 60 years after integration, across the nation. All of the Evanston kids had been tracked into their classes based on how they'd performed on a test they took in eighth grade.

Last September, for the first time, most incoming freshmen, ranging from those reading at grade level to those reading far above it, were sitting together in rigorous humanities classes. When I visited, students of all abilities and backgrounds met in small groups to discuss one of the required readings, which include A Raisin in the Sun and The Odyssey. This September, most freshmen will sit side-by-side in biology classes.

Mindy Wallis, the mother of a sophomore at Evanston Township High, agrees. She opposed the decision to detrack, and spearheaded a petition that advocated waiting for the results of a three-year evaluation before making changes that so substantively affected the freshman class. Angela Allyn, whose 14-year-old son just took a freshman humanities class, says her son was hungry to read more than two-thirds of The Odyssey, which was all the class required. He was encouraged by his teachers to read the entire book, but Allyn says the teachers didn't help him navigate difficult portions during class, so she had to work with him into the late hours of the night. Her son was teased by classmates, she says, for "showing off and using big words," something she believes wouldn't have occurred if he'd been grouped with a similar cohort. Detracking, she contends, focuses "on bringing the bottom up--and there's an assumption that our bright children will take care of themselves." She acknowledges that because she's seen as having "white privilege," despite the fact that she put herself through school and even occasionally had to use soup kitchens to get by, she's perceived as racist by merely making such a comment.
Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, also believes that race is part of the debate: "People who support tracking are more interested in productivity and less concerned about inequality, and people who are critics tend to focus on inequality and don't spend too much time thinking about productivity." Gamoran argues that schools that want to keep ability-grouping need to do a better job with the students in the lowest tracks, but he also believes that the most capable students may not always be sufficiently challenged in mixed-ability classes. "There's no single solution," he says. "The point is to try to address the limitations of whatever approach is selected."

On Charter Schools and Education Reform

And how an you tell if you're on the wrong side of reform: Does the policy shut down open debate? Does it remove the democratic process? Do parents get to elect the charter board? Do the policymakers have to focus on a villain, in this case, teachers and unions as the bogeyman? Do they insist on closing schools rather than improving them? Do they impose on high stakes decision for children or teachers or schools? Do they talk about return on investment and are there billionaires pulling the strings? Do they focus on "school choice" over civil rights? These are signals that they are on the wrong side of education reform. And yet it's easy to fall into the wrong side. Check out Karran's brilliant analysis why. Thanks to Norm Scott for the video.

"I think we have come a long way"

"I think we have come a long way," said Superintendent Jane Belmore. "The district, as you may know, developed a pretty ambitious achievement plan last year and came out to the community and talked with folks in the community about it, got a lot of buy-in and there are lots of community organizations that are really behind us on that."

Superintendent Belmore says it will take a number of years to complete the process--but says they're fortunate to have the resources to help put it into play this year. "We have a plan that we're now looking at, really what I'm calling kind of sorting the priorities of the priorities, because it's very ambitious," she said. "We're not going to be able to do everything at the same level, at the same time, but we're really figuring out what the things are that are going to give us the most leverage."

The Urban League of Greater Madison has been on the forefront of the fight to address the achievement gap. President and CEO Kaleem Caire says he thought the achievement gap plan was too broad to begin with.

Laid-off teachers look for their Plan B

Sarah Gardner:Thousands of teachers are notheading back to school this week. Budget cuts have hit one of this country's largest professions especially hard. In the last three years, more than 300,000 education jobs have disappeared. And that's left a lot of people working on their Plan B. Former technology teacher Chris Bjuland found his at the airport.

Chris Bjuland:I was working as a teacher in the Archdiocese of San Francisco, and I got called down to the principal's office one day between classes, and he said, "Well I'm sorry to do this, but we've had some budget problems and so we're going to have to let you and all the part-time teachers go."

I did look for other teaching jobs. After about a year of really trying and seeing how frustrating it was, it was time to open up the horizons.

New Jersey Monthly's high school survey isn't the whole story

Last week New Jersey Monthly published its biennial ranking of the state's 328 public high schools, a closely-followed contest among N.J. districts. The top-ranked school in N.J. is New Providence High School in Union County, which boasts combined SAT scores of 1737 and a 97.7% graduation rate. The lowest-ranked traditional high school is Thomas Jefferson Arts Academy in Elizabeth, which admits to combined SAT scores of 1136 and a 53% graduation rate.

Rankings were compiled by an independent research firm in Ringwood called Leflein Associates, which used a combination of factors in its calculations, including average class size; SAT, A.P. and state assessment scores (HSPA); graduation rates; and socio-economic ranking (DFG).

Yesterday the Christie Administration released the long-awaited the Education Transformation Task Force report. As NJ Spotlight reports, the 239-page report "was a gargantuan effort, with teams of educators and lawyers poring over more than 3,000 pages of the state's voluminous laws and administrative code over the past six months." (Also see overview from Courier Post.) Or, as the Task Force puts it,

Through the superintendents' survey and countless conversations with educators across New Jersey, the Department learned that the State over the course of many years saddled educators with rules on every subject imaginable. The result is an accretion of provisions in statutes and regulations that ties the hands of schools and districts and stymies innovation. This not only frustrates good people trying to help students learn, it also increases costs and, on occasion, even erects obstacles to student achievement.

Texas Students Revolt Against Mandatory RFID Tracking Chips

'Students and parents at two San Antonio schools are in revolt over a program that forces kids to wear RFID tracking name tags which are used to pinpoint their location on campus as well as outside school premises.

Students at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School will be mandated to wear the tags from today which will be used to track them on campus as well as when they enter and leave school.

132 Wisconsin Schools of Recognition

State Superintendent Tony Evers announced 132 Wisconsin School of Recognition awards for the 2012-13 academic year, an honor that recognizes success in educating students from low-income families.

"Congratulations on a strong start to the 2012-13 school year," Evers said. "These schools are being recognized for their work to break the link between poverty and low academic achievement through rigorous programming and attention to student needs. Their efforts align with our Agenda 2017 goals: to improve graduation rates, reduce dropout rates, and close college and career readiness gaps."

September 6, 2012

Schools That Can Milwaukee September 2012 Update

Happy start to the school year! Our team is more excited than ever about the transformational work being done across Milwaukee.

Today, our 24 STCM partner schools serve over 10,000 students. As I hear the "first day" stories from several of our partner schools, I am reminded of all of the work put in by our coaches and school leaders to prepare: I am reminded of the four days of leadership training STCM held with more than 80 leaders from across the city coming together to focus on excellence in their schools; I am reminded of the more than 135 new urban teachers that came together for a STCM training focused on high-impact instructional practices.

The power of this group is real and the momentum is visible - these are the leaders that will change Milwaukee's education system and prepare our future leaders. The results we have seen in each of the three STCM pathways (described below) are an early indication of what is possible for our city.

While I am more aware of the challenges facing our students, families, teachers, leaders and schools in Milwaukee, I am more hopeful than ever about what I know is possible. However, we can't do it alone. It takes engagement from city leaders, educators, non-profit partners, business leaders and foundations. Join us in the movement to support quality across Milwaukee.

Achievement Growth: International and U.S. State Trends in Student Performance; Wisconsin near the bottom....

"The United States' failure to educate its students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country's ability to thrive in a global economy." Such was the dire warning recently issued by a task force sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Chaired by former New York City schools chancellor Joel I. Klein and former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, the task force said that the country "will not be able to keep pace--much less lead--globally unless it moves to fix the problems it has allowed to fester for too long."

The report's views are well supported by the available evidence. In a 2010 report, only 6 percent of U.S. students were found to be performing at the advanced level in mathematics, a percentage lower than those attained by 30 other countries.ii Nor is the problem limited to top-performing students.

Only 32 percent of 8th- graders in the United States are proficient in mathematics, placing the United States 32nd when ranked among the participating international jurisdictions. Although these facts are discouraging, the United States has made substantial additional financial commitments to K-12 education and introduced a variety of school reforms.

Have these policies begun to help the United States close the international gap?

Progress was far from uniform across the United States, however. Indeed, the variation across states was about as large as the variation among the countries of the world. Maryland won the gold medal by having the steepest overall growth trend. Coming close behind, Florida won the silver medal and Delaware the bronze. The other seven states that rank among the top-10 improvers, all of which outpaced the United States as a whole, are Massachusetts, Louisiana, South Carolina, New Jersey, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Virginia.

Iowa shows the slowest rate of improvement. The other four states whose gains were clearly less than those of the United States as a whole, ranked from the bottom, are Maine, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Nebraska. Note, however, that because of nonparticipation in the early NAEP assessments, we cannot estimate an improvement trend for the 1992-2011 time period for nine states--Alaska, Illinois, Kansas, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont, and Washington.

What's A Charter School If Not A Game Changer?

At this year's charter school convention in Minneapolis, the birthplace of the movement, vendors sounded almost giddy about the millions of dollars charter schools spend every year. The vendors are selling everything from graphing calculators and playground equipment to packaged curricula and risk-management services.

Charter schools today are big business. The public and private money that's going into charter schools, though, is not the main reason for their remarkable growth, Ted Kolderie says.

Kolderie, considered by many as the "godfather" of the charter school movement, says charters have grown because of the need for real options for kids who haven't done well in traditional public schools.

.....

Kolderie, a former journalist turned academic, designed and helped pass the nation's first charter school laws. He began the work in Minnesota in 1991, despite formidable opposition -- and not just from teachers' unions.

"School boards' associations, superintendents' associations, principals' associations -- the whole array of organizations regarded in most states as the most powerful at the [state] capitol," he says. "So the opposition wasn't just something that the unions led."

Ironically, Kolderie says, it was a top union leader who first endorsed and promoted the concept of charter schools in the spring of 1988. Al Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, gave a supportive speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

"We're meeting here today because it's time to take a major step forward in trying to improve the schools of our nation," he said.

In Defense of the Living, Breathing Professor

As classes resume on our nation's campuses, amid anxiety about high tuition, student debt and other concerns, it's worth examining what we value in college education. The question warrants consideration, in particular, following a recent recommendation by distinguished economists, appointed by the National Academy of Sciences, proposing to define the "output" of higher education as a combination of credit hours awarded and degrees earned.

That reduces the work of colleges to counting how many students they push through the system--a bit like defining a movie studio's output as the number of feet of raw footage shot, with no consideration of whether the resulting movies are any good.

Hallway, a homework helper for high school students

Hallway, a startup created by high-school students for high-school students, is launching to the public today with seed funding from Fortify.vc.

The founders view their technology as the next logical step in education, and this summer, they've been testing the private beta at schools across the Greater Washington region.

Hallway is a website where students submit questions about subjects, such as algebra or political science, that their peers can answer. The site uses a Reddit-style system to rate the most useful questions and answers, which then rise to the top.

California Higher Education's Hollow Core

Some reflect the failure to manage effectively forces that have been inflating the nationwide higher education bubble. The cost of attending college, greatly outpacing the rate of inflation almost everywhere, has skyrocketed in California: Whereas nationwide tuition and fees at public universities over the last five years have risen on average by 28 percent, the average increase at UC campuses is an astounding 73.1 percent and, at Cal State campuses a still more astounding 83.8 percent. While turning away students and seeking billions for new buildings, California institutions are significantly under-using classroom and laboratory space. And, absent drastic reform, in little more than a decade the Cal State and UC systems are unlikely to be able to meet their obligations to faculty retirement programs.

More menacing to higher education in California is educators' adoption of curricula, classroom pedagogy, and limitations on free speech that fly in the face of liberal education's fundamental requirements. These practices also fly in the face of public opinion.

Wesleyan University offers a three-year bachelor's degree

Kai Ryssdal: There was an item in the Washington Post last week that piqued our interest. The president of an elite private college in Connecticut said he's looking for ways to make school cheaper and let students graduate in less time.

The school is Wesleyan University. The president, Michael Roth, is also an alum. Back in the day, he got through in three years to save his parents some money. And with tuition where it is now, two fewer semesters can mean even bigger savings.

Michael Roth, good to have you with us.

Michael Roth: Nice to be here.

Ryssdal: How's this going to work? Do you just double up on courses and work in the summertime?

A 1939 Map of Physics

Geography was my favourite subject in school; physics the one I disliked the most. If only I'd known about this Map of Physics!

This spatial representation of the subject, dating from 1939, defines itself as Being a map of physics, containing a brief historical outline of the subject as will be of interest to physicists, students, laymen at large; Also giving a description of the land of physics as seen by the daring sould who venture there; And more particularly the location of villages (named after pioneer physicists) as found by the many rivers; Also the date of founding of each village; As well as the date of its extinction; and finally a collection of various and sundry symbols frequently met with on the trip.

Computer programming will soon reach all Estonian schoolchildren

Estonian Tiger Leap Foundation in September 2012 launched a program called "ProgeTiiger", in the framework of which Estonian students in grades 1 to 12 will be introduced computer programming and creating web and mobile applications.

"The interest of students towards using modern technologies has grown year after year. With the "ProgeTiiger" program we create prerequisites for students to develop from consumers of software to developers of software," said Tiger Leap Foundation training sphere manager Ave Lauringson.

In the first stage, the program concerns pilot schools, in the following years all public schools can join if they want to become part of the "ProgeTiiger" program.

The first ones to start with "ProgeTiiger" program lessons will be primary school students after their teachers go through corresponding training in September. Next year, programming hobby groups for middle school and selective courses for high school will be added. Study materials for all levels are being created. Tiger Leap Foundation's initiative is supported by technology sphere

September 5, 2012

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The Lost Decade of the Middle Class

The study released last week by the Pew Research Center confirms a trend that political economists have been observing for years -- the middle class, the 50% of American households earning between $39,000 to $118,000, are now headed backward in income for the first time since the end of World War II.

The bedrock of a stable society is a large and healthy middle class. They not only do the bulk of the work and pay the lion's share of the taxes, but their level of affluence gives them a personal stake in the survival of existing political and economic orders.

Is Teach for America Working?

When Teach for America entered the national stage it was applauded as a fresh, innovative approach to education. Now, well into its second decade of providing teachers to struggling schools across the country, is it still a good idea for our children? Has bringing in smart, young college graduates improved the education that American children are receiving?

Fears in Taiwan over downside of education boom

When Hsu Chung-hsin went to university three decades ago he became part of a small elite in Taiwan. Now virtually everyone can enter higher education. That, he thinks, is deplorable.

"It's become so easy. As long as you're willing to pay the tuition, you can go to university. That's no good," said Hsu, a legislator with a PhD in law from Cambridge.

"It doesn't influence the top universities. It's the low-end universities that are affected. Their quality is low. The teaching is not so serious and the students are not so hard-working."

Declining birth rates and an explosion in the number of universities -- there are more than 160 for a population of 23 million -- mean the vast majority of high school students gain entry to higher education.

Teachers unions' alliance with Democratic Party frays

Teachers unions have been the Democratic Party's foot soldiers for more than half a century, providing not only generous financial backing but an army of volunteers in return for support of their entrenched power in the nation's public schools.

But this relationship is fraying, and the deterioration was evident Monday as Democrats gathered here for their national convention.

A handful of teachers and parents, carrying large inflated pencils, picketed a screening of "Won't Back Down," a movie to be released this month starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis as mothers, one a teacher, who try to take over a failing inner-city school.

Lawmakers abandon California teacher evaluation bill

State lawmakers failed to revive a controversial measure that would rewrite state rules on teacher evaluations, but supporters vowed to bring it up again in the next legislative session.

The long-dormant bill, AB 5, was resurrected in recent weeks by Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes (D-Sylmar), according to the Los Angeles Times (http://lat.ms/RwfqnW). It would institute a statewide uniform teacher evaluation system featuring more performance reviews, classroom observations, training of evaluators and public input into the review process.

Education advocates slammed the bill, saying the new rules would have weakened initiatives in Los Angeles and elsewhere to improve the quality of public school instructors.

MoboMath

Using a pen and tablet, or even a trackpad or mouse, simply write an equation as you normally would, tap Enter to convert it to formatted math, and copy or drag it into your target application for calculation, graphing, or documentation.

Outlook not set in stone for Wisconsin school of education enrollment

For all the changes implemented in 2011, one thing hurt enrollment at schools of education more than others, said John Gaffney, recruitment and retention coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point's School of Education.

"The message of teachers being the problem hurt us the most," Gaffney said.

The Act 10 legislation affected teachers' pocketbooks - with union bargaining largely eliminated, higher deductions for benefits were imposed - and the political firestorm that resulted put teachers at the center of attention.

Maggie Beeber, undergraduate advising coordinator at the UW-Stevens Point education school, recounted a story where she was meeting with incoming freshmen. She asked the students if anyone had tried to discourage them from becoming teachers. Nearly every hand went up. Then she asked if more than five people had discouraged them. Most of the hands stayed up.

"It's easy to follow the public discourse about teaching right now and conclude that everything is doomed," said Desiree Pointer Mace, associate dean for graduate education at Alverno College.

September 4, 2012

Madison School District Teacher Handbook Plateau Bargaining

More than 40 members of Madison Teachers Inc. attended Tuesday's board meeting, and executive director John Matthews delivered a letter reminding the board that changes in state law "did not take away the board's ability to engage in conversation about" benefits and work rules.

Board vice president Marj Passman said she preferred a process where management and employees work out their differences.

"I don't care what the governor wants," Passman said. "I'd like to go back to the two equal body process."

Board member Arlene Silveira said several districts included teachers on the committees that developed their handbooks and "having staff input right upfront prevents difficult ways of getting there." She also suggested having a board member present at each meeting.

Prior to the meeting, School Board President James Howard said the work group is for administrators so it doesn't need to include teachers. There will be other advisory groups that will include their input, he said.

"The kids are delighted to be back at school," James Howard said as he addressed the Board and numerous spectators at tonight's Board of Education Workshop. Everyone nodded their heads in agreement, while they anxiously awaited the real topic of conversation. This would be the Board's first public conversation on the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Employee Handbook, a handbook that would replace more than sixty years of collective bargaining.

As Howard spoke, I surveyed the crowd that had gathered in the McDaniels Auditorium at the Doyle Administration Building. Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI) members stood out in their red, Union T-shirts. They made up more than half of the audience. The AFSCME members were dressed in green, representing custodial, maintenance and food service workers in the district. MMSD administrators, community members and a County Board member were also present.

There was some Pollyannaish talk that the "Guiding Principles" in the process document -- especially the first two "1. Improve student learning. As in everything we do, the first question and the top priority is student learning. How does what we are considering impact students? 2. Empower staff to do their best work. How does this impact teachers and staff? Does it help or hinder them in doing their jobs effectively?" -- would be sufficient (a little more below on this), but there seemed to be a consensus that at very least the committee should present some options to the Board. That's another reason to have an inclusive committee; to get better options.

A quick aside on the "Guiding Principals" and related thoughts and then back to the Board's role. It is all well and good to say that student learning is or should be primary in just about everything, but it is also false and serves to marginalize staff. I've long said that the interests of teachers align with the interests of students and the district by about 95% and yes "student learning" is the prime interest. But staff are adults, with mortgages, families to support, loans to pay, relationships to cultivate and maintain, ...They are not and should not be people who put student learning above the their own well being. To even contemplate that they should be is disrespectful. That's why we hear the "All about the students" meme from the anti-teacher/anti-union reform crowd. It sound good, but it is wrong. Think about it, did the people negotiating a contract on behalf of Interim Superintendent Belmore put "student learning at the top of their list? Of course not, and they shouldn't have.

Madison Teachers' Solidarity Newsletter

Members of MTI's Board of Directors and Union staff greeted the District's newly hired teachers at New Teacher Orientation on Monday. There are 250 new members of MTI's teacher bargaining unit.

MTI Executive Director John Matthews addressed the District's new teachers during their Tuesday session. In doing so, Matthews provided a brief history of the Union, its reputation of negotiating outstanding Collective Bargaining Agreements which provide both employment security and economic security, and in explaining the threat to both, given Act 10, said all MTI members would need to pull together to preserve the Madison Metropolitan School District as a quality place to teach.

Matthews told the new hires that these benefits and rights, along with MTI's action to assure due process and workplace justice, has earned MTI the reputation of being one of the best Unions in the country. To illustrate the magnitude of MTI's accomplishments over the years, Matthews told about school board policy mandating female teachers, through the early 1970's, having to advise their principal "immediately upon becoming pregnant", and being obligated to resign when the pregnancy "began showing." As a result of MTI's accomplishments, such antiquated, degrading policies are history, he said.

Matthews also cited MTI's precedent setting accomplishments in advancing employee rights regarding race, religion, sexual orientation, and negotiating such things as the school calendar and health insurance. Until the early 1970's, the school calendar only accommodated Christian holidays. MTI's litigation expanded the benefit to cover all religions.

Continue the Awareness, Continue the Protest, Wear Red for Education

Since February, 2011, MTI members have been tirelessly protesting and working to end the disastrous impact on public sector workers of Governor Scott Walker's union busting destructive budget. The most important reasons for resistance vary from one union member to another and include: the Legislation jeopardizes children's future and the viability of public education and other public services; its provisions are dishonest and immoral; they constitute an attack on Wisconsin's working-class and middle-class values; they ask for no shared sacrifice from the wealthy or profitable corporations.

Payroll checks for all public employees have been substantially lessened because of Act 10, causing financial hardship for many families. Walker's Law forces all public employees to pay 50% of retirement contributions, even though MTI and the Madison Metropolitan School District have agreed as part of one's total compensation package dating to the early 1970's, that the District would pay 100% of the contribution and many have increased contributions for health insurance.
MTI leaders are working with other public sector union leaders across Wisconsin to reverse this disastrous legislation.

Ready, Set, Goal Conferences
As previously reported in MTI Solidarity!, the Ready, Set Goal (RSG) memorandum has been amended, as a result of grievance mediation.

The Memorandum of Understanding between MTI and the Madison Metropolitan School District, which governs RSG Conferences has been amended to include the following parameters which apply, when determining the amount of compensation due a teacher for holding RSG Conferences during times other than scheduled school day(s)/ hours:

Teachers receive up to 15 minutes per student for conference preparation.

Teachers receive up to 30 minutes for each conference held.

Teachers are compensated for up to two parent "no shows" per student, at 30 minutes per scheduled conference. Teachers are not obligated to schedule a RSG conference after there have been two parent "no shows". However, a teacher will be compensated pursuant to Section 2b (second bullet above), if the teacher thereafter holds a RSG conference for the student.

Compensation will continue to include traveling to/from homes of parents, or other mutually agreed upon meeting place(s), or traveling to/from school if the conferences are not at a time adjacent to the Contract day. Mileage shall be paid in accordance with the terms and conditions of the Collective Bargaining Agreement and reasonable expenses for refreshments shall be reimbursed.

The full RSG agreement is located on MTI's website (www.madisonteachers.org). Questions can be directed to Assistant Director Eve Degen at MTI (257-4091 or degene@madisonteachers.org).

Welcoming today's youth at school w/ big smiles, friendly demeanor & high expectations. It's going to be a good year for our future leaders.

District working to pay more attention to new students

The later students enter Madison schools, the less likely they are to graduate on time and score well on state tests, according to district data Mayor Paul Soglin requested this year. The data do not take into account other variables connected to achievement such as race and income (bold added).

"Maybe we shouldn't be as critical of the system in holding the district responsible for the failure of a 14-year-old who's only been here a year and is reading at a seventh-grade level," Soglin said. "If there is a difference, maybe it shows that some intense work should be done with kids upon arrival."

Expats in Singapore arm children for Chinese century

As far back as 25 years ago, US investor Jim Rogers already believed China would be the next economic superpower and young people the world over should prepare for the future by learning Mandarin.

Now 69, the billionaire had a chance to practise what he preached when he moved in 2007 to Singapore with his wife Paige Parker, 43, after visiting Hong Kong and Shanghai in search of an ideal place to bring up his children.

Their daughters Happy, now nine, and Baby Bee, four, are studying in public schools in Singapore, which promotes mastery of Mandarin as part of its own ethnic Chinese heritage and, more pragmatically, to give its people economic opportunities.

"Singapore has the best education in the world, the best healthcare, the best everything. I think that the best gift that I can give two children born in 2003 and 2008 is to know Asia and to speak Mandarin," Rogers told AFP.

On Harlem School Choice

But in interviews in recent weeks, Harlem parents described two drastically different public school experiences, expressing frustration that, among other things, there were still a limited number of high-quality choices and that many schools continued to underperform.

Those fortunate enough to get their sons or daughters into one of the high-performing schools said, for the most part, that they were thrilled with the quality of the teaching and extracurricular programs. Some of the parents who grew up in the neighborhood said that until a few years ago, they would never have imagined such options even existing.

Yet, while most of the charter schools perform relatively well on tests, a majority of Harlem's students attend schools that do not. Among elementary schools in Harlem and East Harlem, only a few of the some 25 traditional neighborhood schools with students taking statewide tests had at least 50 percent of children reading at or above grade level.

Sri Lanka's Lecturers go on strike, and the government has a drastic response

THE Buddhist monk, staring intently at the smoke rising from an incense stick, said the government was destroying state-provided education because it was "easier to control uneducated fools". Maduluwawe Sobitha is an influential figure among Sri Lanka's majority Sinhala population. He is also a loud critic of the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa. The monk's new National Movement Against Social Injustice is, with other groups and unions, backing a university lecturers' strike for more state spending on education. Almost 5,000 academics stopped work on July 4th. Like them, he is angry that the government spends a mere 1.9% of GDP on schools and universities.

On August 23rd the higher education minister, S.B. Dissanayake, responded by closing down indefinitely the country's state universities and institutes. He accused lecturers of dragging students into their campaign. Yet students, among them young Buddhist monks, still protest, demanding that the universities be reopened. On August 29th police in Colombo fired water cannon and tear gas at hundreds of students marching in support of academics. Members of the Inter University Students' Federation (IUSF) retaliated by flinging whatever they could lay their hands on, including rocks and spent tear-gas canisters, at police.

Advocating More Rigorous Wisconsin Academic Standards

Similarly, Wisconsin is now in the process of raising its academic standards and its ability to accurately gauge student, teacher and school performance.

This is a good thing, too -- even though ratings for many students and some schools will fall when initially put into place. It's not that students will be learning less. It's that more rigorous instruction and assessments are coming on board.

Our students, parents, teachers and taxpayers deserve this more accurate picture of progress toward higher goals -- the ones Wisconsin will need to meet to succeed in the knowledge-based, highly competitive global economy.

An Interview with UW-Madison School of Education Dean Julie Underwood

It's an unprecedented amount of change, honestly," says Julie Underwood, the dean of UW-Madison's highly ranked School of Education.

Consider:

The state this year will start rating each school on a scale of 0 to 100 based on student test scores and other measurables. The idea, in part, is to give parents a way to evaluate how a school is performing while motivating those within it to improve.

Several schools across the state -- including Madison's Shorewood Elementary, Black Hawk Middle and Memorial High schools -- are part of Wisconsin's new teacher and principal evaluation system, which for the first time will grade a teacher's success, in part, on student test scores. This system is to be implemented across Wisconsin in 2014-15.li>And instead of Wisconsin setting its own student benchmarks, the state is moving toward using Common Core State Standards, which have been adopted in 45 other states. State schools are starting new curricula this year in language arts and math so students will be prepared by the 2014-15 school year to take a new state exam tied to this common core and replacing the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination.

Although Underwood says she generally backs most of these changes, she's no fan of the decision announced last month that makes it easier for a person to become a public school teacher -- even as those who are studying to become teachers must now meet stiffer credentialing requirements. Instead of having to complete education training at a place like UW-Madison en route to being licensed, those with experience in private schools or with other teaching backgrounds now can take steps to become eligible for a public teaching license.

"I think that's really unfortunate," says Underwood, who first worked at UW-Madison from 1986-95 before coming back to town as education dean in 2005.

What Did You Do All Day?

Of the many complaining questions that faculty members ask, the one I used to hear most often was, "Why do you administrators make so much more money than we do?" The answer is simple: Administrators work harder, they have more work to do, and they actually do it.

Now that I have made the passage back from administrator to faculty member, I know how true that is. Where before my calendar was crowded and even double-booked, now the largely empty pages beckon me forward to a life of comparative ease and downright leisure. Sure, I have some students to teach, and some papers to correct, and I chair a committee and go to a few meetings and write columns and essays; but I did all of that when I was a dean in addition to everything I did because I was a dean.

A selection of highlights from The British Science Festival's illustrious 19th-century past

The annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831 and attended by "300 gentlemen", quickly became the leading scientific event in Great Britain, the place where important advances were announced and great issues debated. The British Science Festival, as it is now called, takes place in Aberdeen from September 4 to 9. Below Clive Cookson selects his highlights from the event's illustrious 19th-century past and looks forward to next week's festival.

September 3, 2012

Zach Galin Interview on College Prep, Parents, Financing and Careers

Zach has spent the past nine years working independently with students and families in the college admissions process. From test preparation to college matching, applications, and financial aid, Zach has helped students gain acceptance to their top choice schools.

Zach spent his undergraduate years at Northwestern University, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Learning and Organizational Change. He was actively engaged in student government, Greek life, cultural affairs, and community service. Upon graduation, he ran an academic tutoring and test prep center on New York City's upper west side. He worked with hundreds of families to diagnose students' specific academic deficiencies and develop courses from a variety of text-based and digital curricula to improve their skills.

An expert's view of Common Core's focus on nonfiction texts

The Common Core national standards are increasingly controversial, with Utah, Indiana and a number of states that had adopted them now reconsidering. A recent New York Times education blog notes the following:

Forty-four states and United States territories have adopted the Common Core Standards and, according to this recent Times article, one major change teachers can expect to see is more emphasis on reading "informational," or nonfiction, texts across subject areas:

While English classes will still include healthy amounts of fiction, the standards say that students should be reading more nonfiction texts as they get older, to prepare them for the kinds of material they will read in college and careers. In the fourth grade, students should be reading about the same amount from "literary" and "informational" texts, according to the standards; in the eighth grade, 45 percent should be literary and 55 percent informational, and by 12th grade, the split should be 30/70.

And seeing itself as a potential vendor, the Times chirps cheerfully: "Well, The New York Times and The Learning Network are here to help"

There's been a lot written on the loss of literature in curricula around the country. And there is good reason for that. As I noted in testimony to the Utah Education Interim Committee:
"Massachusetts' remarkable rise on national assessments is not because we aligned our reading standards to the NAEP. Rather, it is because, unlike Common Core, our reading standards emphasized high-quality literature. Reading literature requires the acquisition in a compressed timeframe of a richer and broader vocabulary than non-fiction texts. Vocabulary acquisition is all-important in the timely development of higher-level reading skills."
But even if you agree with the idea of refocusing our classrooms on nonfiction texts, what is the quality of the offerings suggested by Common Core, a set of standards copyrighted by two Washington-based entities (the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association)?.

American School Board Journal: Q&A with Will Fitzhugh, research paper advocate

Will Fitzhugh is a great believer in the educational power of the high school research paper. In fact, he's such a fan that he founded The Concord Review in 1987 to publish student research papers and highlight the academic quality of their work.

But his mission is a bit tougher these days. In 2002, he conducted a study of high school history teachers and discovered that, although nearly all of them said a term paper was a good idea, 62 percent never assigned a 12-page paper--and 27 percent never assigned an eight-page paper.

Page numbers aren't the only measure of a writing project, but the consensus is that the rigor of high school research papers hasn't improved over the years. And that means that--outside of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses--very few students are tested by this kind of rigorous writing project.

Recently, Fitzhugh shared his thoughts on the poor showing of high school writing projects with ASBJ Senior Editor Del Stover.

Why should it matter if students are writing lengthy term papers?

"Two great things about serious research papers: They ask for a lot of reading, and as a result, the student learns a lot about something. This encourages students to believe that, through their own efforts for the most part, they can learn about other things in the future. In addition, a serious research paper can help them keep out of remedial reading and writing classes at college."

To engage students, some educators are allowing students to communicate through a variety of media. Is this innovative--or a mistake?

"This is a mistake by teachers desperate to pander to student interests instead of requiring them to do the hard work essential to their education. When the Business Roundtable companies spend $3 billion-plus each year on remedial writing courses for their employees--hourly and salaried, current and new--they do not have them write blogs, read comic books, or enjoy PowerPoint presentations. That would waste their money and the time of students, and it wouldn't accomplish the remedial writing tasks."

Is the term paper really dead? You're still publishing term papers in your quarterly, so you must still be seeing teachers--and students--who are rising to the highest standards?

"The papers I have been getting continue to impress me. I could tell you stories of students who spend months on their submissions to The Concord Review and then send me an Emerson Prize-winning 15,000-word paper. Many of these students are going well beyond the expectations and standards of their schools because they seek to be published. But, as I say, for most students, they are never asked even to try a serious history research paper.

In general, it is safe to say that all U.S. public high schools are unlikely to assign rigorous term papers, and the kids suffer accordingly."
What advice can you offer to school board members and administrators as they struggle to raise student skills in reading and writing?

"The California State College System reports that 47 percent of their freshmen are in remedial reading courses, and in a survey of college professors by The Chronicle of Higher Education, 90 percent of them said their students are not very well prepared in reading or writing, or in doing research.

So school board members should be aware of how poorly we are preparing our kids in nonfiction reading and academic expository writing--and they should ask their superintendents what can be done about that.

I've argued that, if reading and writing is a serious skill that kids need, then we have to decide if we are willing to invest [in this effort]. Kids are spending three or four hours of time on homework a week and 54 hours on entertainment. It's not going to kill them to spend four more hours a week on a paper."

Loss of master's degree pay bump has impact on teachers, grad schools

The dropping of the master's bump in many districts is also raising new questions about what kind of outside training is relevant to help teachers improve outcomes with their students, and what those teachers - who are already taking home less pay by contributing more to their benefits - will consider to be worth the investment.

Wauwatosa East High School government teacher Ann Herrera Ward is one educator puzzled by the turning tide on advanced degrees.

Ward earned her bachelor's degree in political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before working in the U.S. House of Representatives for seven years, then got on the road to a teaching license through Marquette University, where she got a master's in instructional leadership.

Entering her 20th year as a teacher, she's finishing her dissertation for her doctorate degree: a study of how kids learn about elections and politics by discussing the matters in school and at home.

Poverty Higher Than he 1960's When War on Poverty Began

There is more evidence of the growing wealth gap in the US: A new report says that the number of people living in poverty could be at its highest level in nearly half a century. So how can the US government help its least fortunate?

In 2010, one in six Americans were considered poor. That is more than 47 million people living on less than $10,500 per year.

"We are creating poverty in this country .... If you are unemployed, employers are not going to want to hire you because you are unemployed. If your credit rating is bad, nobody is going to want to hire you. It's like we have a system for pushing people who begin to slide down further and further."

- Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of the book Nickel and Dimed

The official government numbers on poverty in 2011 will be released just weeks ahead of the November presidential elections.

But an associated press survey of economists and think tanks says that the number of poor Americans could reach 15.7 per cent, making it the highest level since the 1960's.

Trading caps and gowns for mops

After commencement, a growing number young people say they have no choice but to take low-skilled jobs, according to a survey released this week.

Another survey by Rutgers University came to the same conclusion: Half of graduates in the past five years say their jobs didn't require a four-year degree and only 20% said their first job was on their career path. "Our society's most talented people are unable to find a job that gives them a decent income," says Cliff Zukin, a professor of political science and public policy at Rutgers.

Is a Science Ph.D. a Waste of Time?

Few people spend 11 years in college. Most stay for four or five before the urge to leave campus and earn a salary kicks in. Barring a thesis defense meltdown, I'll be one of about 50,000 graduate students across the United States and Canada to get a Ph.D. in science this school year. After seven years in graduate school, I'm left wondering if the time and effort was worth it. What do scientists do these days, anyways?
According to several recent reports, not much. The problem, stated last month in the Washington Post, is that academic jobs have all but disappeared. A 2011 report in Nature concurs: "People who have trained at great length and expense to be researchers confront a dwindling number of academic jobs, and an industrial sector unable to take up the slack."

A 2010 article in the Economist subtitled "Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time" is even more damning of doctorates. To be fair, that article targeted all Ph.D.s, but the reporter made science doctorates seem particularly worthless, writing that she "slogged through a largely pointless PhD in theoretical ecology." After crunching the numbers and talking to about a dozen people with science doctorates, though, I've concluded that for everything these accounts get right, they get just as much wrong. In short, science Ph.D.s are just about the last group of people the media should be worrying about. Let me explain.

10 things to watch for in the new school year

They have reduced the teaching staff and increased the workload for many teachers (giving them a boost in pay).

But what really interests me is a key to their plan: Making fundamental changes in the dynamic of education.

The goal is that a lot of the presentation of lectures and other instruction will come via video and the Internet. Education will be more customized for students, students will take more responsibility for their learning, and teachers will do more coaching, mentoring, monitoring.

There's a lot of ferment in education over changes such as these. Oconomowoc will be an important test case.

September 2, 2012

Madison School District Employee Handbook Process

Improve student learning. As in everything we do, the first question and the top priority is student learning. How does what we are considering impact students?

Empower staff to do their best work. How does this impact teachers and staff? Does it help or hinder them in doing their jobs effectively?

Strategically align use of resources. Does this align with our strategic plan and achievement gap plan? Will it allow us to implement, measure, and improve that work? Is it financially responsible?

Avoid redundancies and create consistencies. Are pieces of the handbook already outlined in state law or Board policy or other mandates?

Consider incremental change. Can we work toward a larger goal through incremental steps?

Respectful discussion.

I will be surprised if the school District's handbook differs materially from the current 182 page union contract. Some Districts will think very differently, while most will, I suspect continue business as usual.

The Harvard Cheating Scandal Is Stupid

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Harvard University is investigating what it calls an "unprecedented" case of cheating. College officials say around 125 students may have shared answers and plagiarized on a [Introduction To Congress] final exam.

What a scandal that such a thing would happen at Harvard! "Academic integrity issues are a bedrock of the educational mission." And etc.

Before everyone rushes to their predetermined sides, can we ask why, when there are cheating scandals, they are almost always in introductory classes? When the stakes are lowest?

75% of the students in these kind of courses get As and Bs because of Grade Inflation. I'd put big money down that if I used a crayon to draw an elephant and a donkey I'd get at least a B+ with the margin comment, "Interesting take, could you elaborate?"

And yet the students here felt compelled to cheat. Take a minute away from your self-righteousness and put yourself in their shoes. Did they not think they could get an A on their own? Or.... is "cheating" the only way to create the kind of answer that the professor wants?

The first of a new breed of elite private school opens its doors

THE first time he tried to create the "next generation of schools", back in the early 1990s, Chris Whittle's focus was on improving the education of the poorest pupils in America's worst-performing public schools. Although in doing so the perennially bow-tied entrepreneur from Tennessee helped pioneer the charter-school movement, his Edison Project ultimately failed to thrive as a business. Now, with Benno Schmidt and Alan Greenberg, he is trying to reinvent education for bright, rich kids. On September 10th "Avenues: The World School", the first of a planned global network, will welcome 700 pupils into a lavishly converted warehouse next to Manhattan's popular High Line park. Their parents will typically pay just under $40,000 a year (in line with New York's established top-tier private schools), having been promised cutting-edge technology and everything else to match.

Getting this far has not been easy for Mr Whittle, who says he has had to become "one third educator, one third real-estate developer, and one third investment banker." After conceiving the idea in 2007 of creating a chain of similar schools in the world's leading cities, the financial crisis robbed him of funding, a business partner and the intended first Manhattan site. Eventually he raised the $75m needed to get the first school up and running, found another site, and then toured the world to recruit staff and pupils. Many of the teaching staff have previously worked at other elite east-coast private schools, including Phillips Exeter, Hotchkiss and Dalton. (Even more gratifying than the 2,600 applications to attend Avenues were the 4,900 applications it received to teach there, says Mr Whittle.)

Middle School Charters in Texas: An Examination of Student Characteristics and Achievement Levels of Entrants and Leavers

Charter schools have proliferated in Texas and across the nation. The expansion of charter schools is now a popular reform effort for many policymakers on both the right and left of the political spectrum. To examine the efficacy of such policies, a number of researchers have focused on the effects charter schools have had on student achievement, most of which have found little difference in achievement between the two types of schools (CREDO, 2009; Zimmer, R., Gill, B., Booker, K., Lavertu, S., Sass, T., and Witte, 2008). Yet, there is still a relative dearth of information about the characteristics of students entering and leaving charter schools and how these characteristics might be related to school-level achievement. This is particularly true with respect to charter schools in Texas. Most of the work in this area has focused on student racial and ethnic characteristics, while a fair number of studies have examined special education status and English-Language Learner status of entrants. Very little research has focused on the academic ability of students entering charter schools, the student attrition rate of charter schools, and the characteristics of the students staying and leaving charter schools. This study seeks to ameliorate this paucity of information, particularly as it pertains to high-profile and high-enrollment charter schools in Texas.

Nutritious School Lunches, or the New Hunger Games?

After a years-long crusade, activists including Michelle Obama have finally landed more nutritious lunches in public schools. But rather than giving thanks, hungry kids are pleading, 'Please, first lady, may I have some more?' Kevin Fallon on the response from health experts.

"Give me some seconds, I, I need to get some food today," croons Callahan Grund, a 16-year-old football player from Wallace County High School in Sharon Springs, Kan. "My friends are in the corner store getting junk so they don't waste away ..."

Set to the tune of fun.'s chart-topping hit "We Are Young," "We Are Hungry" is a video made by a group of Wallace County students and teachers who are tired of their stomachs grumbling after new regulations mandated healthier lunches be served in school. In the clip, which has already accrued over 500,000 views on YouTube, Grund and his classmates are seen collapsing during sports practice, stealing food off each other's lunch trays, and frowning over puny-sized pieces of meat. "Tonight, we are hungry / Set the policy on fire, it can burn brighter than the sun."

Triumph of a tough writing teacher

One of Anne Collins's sons was not a strong writer. He struggled at Gonzaga College High School, an all-boys Catholic school in Northwest Washington, until his junior year in 2005, when he took an English class taught by Rick Cannon. Amazing things began to happen.

Cannon, a Gonzaga teacher since 1976, seemed to Collins from another time, perhaps another planet. He asked parents for help in limiting use of word processors. He wanted students to write in longhand as much as possible. Slower writing was better writing. His slogan: "Rewrite always."

The Creep of Marketplace Reasoning into Public Schools (Part 3)

$If you are a second grader in an underachieving Dallas (TX) school for each book you read you will get paid $2.

And it is this last item that I want to elaborate because schools have become reformers' favorite targets for cash incentives to change student and teacher behavior that go well beyond the business involvement I described in Arlington (VA) in the 1970s and 1980s. The "creep of marketplace reasoning into public schools" is the unexamined use of these cash incentives in current school reform efforts to solve larger national problems -producing skilled graduates to strengthen U.S. economic competitiveness and reduce inequalities in the U.S.

We are now projected to receive an additional $11.8 million in state aid, but because of the state revenue limit, we only have the authority to increase our spending by $8.1 million. That means that $3.7 million of our projected $11.8 million increase in state aid must be used to shift spending off of the property tax levy. This shift results in a property tax increase of 3.47%, which is down from the original increase of 4.95% that you approved in the preliminary budget.

In other words, we will immediately deliver $3.7 million or nearly 1.5% in property tax relief for our constituents.

Close look at KIPP charter school challenges

I have been following the progress of KIPP public charter schools since 2001. Initially this charter network was just one story out of many. But when its first school here, the KIPP DC: KEY Academy, began performing better than Northwest Washington schools with many middle class children, I made it a regular stop.

I also spent time with the network's founders, Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg, visited about 40 of their other schools and wrote a book about KIPP, "Work Hard. Be Nice," published in 2009.

This summer there are 125 KIPP schools with a total of 39,000 students in 20 states and the District. Eighty-seven percent of KIPP students are from families poor enough to qualify for federal lunch subsidies. Fifty-nine percent are black and 36 percent Hispanic.

Does Milwaukee's Voucher Program Work or Not?

The Legislative Audit Bureau's (LAB) review of the final year of the state-authorized five year longitudinal study of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) is once again bringing the never-ending debate on the efficacy of school choice into the public discourse.

The LAB analysis is news only if you did not read the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP) studies when they were released earlier this year. The SCDP states clearly: "There is some evidence that the larger achievement growth of the MPCP students that we observe is attributable to the introduction of the accountability policy." In other words, after five years we know MPCP and MPS students experience similar gains in math scores, and statistically significant gains in reading scores that may or may not be caused by the change in testing policy.

Some perspective. Even statistically significant gains are not necessarily all that substantively significant. A slightly higher reading score is not going to make or break the future of a child. It is important to understand what the SCDP study actually set out to accomplish. It was a program evaluation designed to determine how the MPCP impacted Milwaukee students. Accordingly, over the course of the study the public learned an almost overwhelming amount about a program that was once criticized for being understudied. The public now knows:

Madison's Talented & Gifted Plan Revisions

The initial TAG Plan, created by a variety of stakeholders including teachers, administrators, parents, and community members was approved by the Board of Education on August 27, 2009, and revised and approved on December 13, 2010. The Department of Public Instruction determined that the MMSD TAG Department was out of compliance at the end of May 2011. In June 2011, the current coordinator assumed duties and a new TAG Plan was written to address issues of noncompliance; the plan was approved by the BOE on August 8, 2011. An extension of one year was granted to MMSD to become compliant. The TAG End-of-Year document uses the framework of the original plan and incorporates information that addresses compliance issues as outlined in the 2011 TAG Plan. DPI has indicated that the audit will take place in the last half of September, 2012.

In the letter to Mr. Howard (August 14, 2012), DPI requested additional documentation be submitted to the DPI no later than September 7. The TAG Plan is a major piece of this documentation.

Madison School District Student Assessment Summary

MAP often shows substantial declines in the percent of students identified as proficient or advanced as compared to past WKCE scores. This does not reflect a change in students' abilities, but rather reflects a change to higher standards. MMSD's WKCE results have been consistent for years.

With 2011-12 being the first year that MMSD administered MAP, great caution must be exercised to avoid over-interpretation of results. One of the advantages of MAP is the ability to measure growth, and 2011-12 represent only a single data point. Plans for the immediate future include rigorous statistical analysis that will include significance tests to focus in on areas of excellence and possible concern.

Student proficiencies are lower as measured by MAP than Wisconsin Knowledge Concepts Exam (WKCE). This is likely due to MAP being a more difficult and rigorous assessment than WKCE. MAP is also normed at the national level. MMSD has largely done well against other Wisconsin districts, but its results are not as strong when compared nationally.

September 1, 2012

15 Wisconsin groups eye Race to the Top funds; Madison won't apply

Madison recently completed and is now implementing "an ambitious and innovative plan to improve student achievement and close gaps." The district had discussed applying for Race to the Top funds in recent weeks, but decided the timing wasn't right, Belmore told the board.

"A year or two from now, we feel MMSD would be poised to take advantage of an opportunity like this one and make a competitive case," Belmore wrote to the board. "But based on our implementation time line, we feel this grant does not come at the right time for our district. This year, we will be disciplined in focusing our internal resources on effectively implementing our achievement gap plan and making improvements for all students."

Tom Knight, Godfather Of Synthetic Biology, On How To Learn Something New

It was partly frustration with designing silicon chips that led Tom Knight to the study of biology. A senior research scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Knight started working in MIT's AI Lab while he was in high school. As an MIT student and faculty member, in the '60s and '70s Knight was a co-engineer of ARPANET, a precursor of the Internet, and helped design the first commercial single-user computer workstations, eventually earning more than 30 patents for his work in computer science and electrical engineering. In the 1990s, Knight became fascinated with biology, went back to school, and set up a molecular biology lab within MIT's computer science lab. There, Knight invented BioBricks--standardized DNA "parts" that make up a kind of free operating system for biotechnology. For his pioneering work merging concepts from engineering and biology, Knight is widely considered the godfather of the emerging science of synthetic biology. Here, this key player in the technological revolution of the last century talks about biology as this century's defining technology, the need for scientific generalists, and the best way to learn something new.

America Needs A Longer School Year

(CNN) -- In America, summer holds a special place in our hearts: lazy afternoons, camping at the lake, warm evenings gazing at the moon. For children, especially, summer can unleash the free flow of discovery. For older children, summer often brings their first job.

But this idyllic picture masks the reality that for too many children, particularly those from low-income families, languid summers can be educationally detrimental, and for families in which both parents work, summers are a logistical nightmare.

Considerable research shows that the primary reason the achievement gap between poor children and their more affluent peers widens over the course of their school careers is the long break in learning over the summer. It's called summer slide.

A Worksheet for Math-Phobic Parents

Tammy Jolley is one of them--"a horrible math-phobic," she says. After struggling through algebra and statistics in high school and college, helping her 9-year-old son Jake with math homework makes her "feel like saying, 'Aaarghh, this is hard! I know why you don't get it,' " says the Madison, Ala., state-court official. Instead, she forces herself to encourage Jake.

Ongoing research is shedding new light on the importance of math to children's success. Math skill at kindergarten entry is an even stronger predictor of later school achievement than reading skills or the ability to pay attention, according to a 2007 study in the journal Developmental Psychology.

Flynn's IQ

In a very small nutshell, his ­explanation for the Flynn Effect is this. Human ­potential at birth is unchanged; we are not, in any fundamental sense, becoming a smarter species. But the way we live has changed. IQ tests were first ­established in the 19th century at a time when daily life was concrete and ­practical. The tests, however, had to be abstract to make them culturally ­neutral. People, therefore, found them harder because they were unaccustomed to such modes of thought.

In the 20th century, greater ­educational possibilities combined with technological advances introduced abstract thought into daily life. It takes, for example, a high degree of abstract thinking to operate a mobile phone or computer. People became better at IQ tests and, steadily, the scores rose. So IQ scores are meaningless unless their date and social norms are taken into account. This leads to Flynn's grandest and most fervently held view -- that a lack of social awareness leads inexorably to folly. Indeed, the penultimate chapter is a list of 14 examples in which science has failed because of social blindness. Low-IQ people, for example, are not more prone to violence and, contrary to widespread assumptions, no clear link between nutrition and IQ has been found.

Austin Schools To Track Students With GPS Devices

School districts are increasingly relying on fancy technology to prevent students from skipping class in order to do important things like fight evil entities emerging from the Hellmouth located underneath the school library. Last May, San Antonio's Northside Independent School district announced they would be using RFID-tagged student ID cards to track students on school campuses and buses. This school year, the Austin Independent School District (AISD) is introducing a global positioning system (GPS) device to track students' whereabouts.

KXAN reports that this GPS device, which resembles a cellphone, will be given to up to 1,700 students with low attendance rates in eight Austin high schools. The students will use this device to check-in with mentors several times a day. Additionally, these mentors will call the students a few times a week to discuss the latest happenings in school.